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What are the different widely used RAID levels and when should I consider them?
I haven't had any trouble building mental images of the simpler RAID forms, but for some reason my head spins when I try to think about 10. Let me walk through my conception:
Mirroring is obvious: N drives, each with a copy of the same data X. So for N=2, we have D(isc) 0 with Xcopy0, and D1 with Xcopy1.
Striping is obvious: N drives, each with 1/Nth of each byte. So for N=2, we have D(isc)0 with Stripe0 having every nybble 0, and D1 with Stripe1 having every nybble 1.
For 10, let's say with 2-bit stripes (i.e., 4 discs), do we need 8 discs, where we mirror D0+D4, D1+D5, D2+D6, and D3+D7, and then stripe D0..D3 (and D4..D7, or does that come for free?).
Or does it work some other way?
Raid 10 is pretty easy. It is a combnination of mirroring (Raid 1) and striping(Raid 0). Instead of striping over single disks you strip over a set of mirrored disks.
This enhances write performance, read performance and redunancy.
You can add as many mirrors as you want to stripe over as many mirror blocks as you want.