It's always better to mirror disks first

It's always better to mirror disks first

This is a Q&A from SAN School Lesson 2.
Click here for more SAN School lessons.

What do you call the first mirror disks and stripe that's on top of them? (Does it give us more flexibility at disk failure time)?

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What you are suggesting is called RAID 1+0, or RAID10 (raid ten) for short. It is always better to mirror disks first and then do striping, rather than create a mirrored stripe set. If you stripe first and then mirror and you lose a drive, the entire stripe set is disabled. If you mirror two disks at a time and then stripe, you can survive multiple disk failures.

Chris

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This was first published in February 2004