AMCC 9590SE-4ME User Manual

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Chapter 1. Introduction to the 3ware Command Line Interface
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3ware Serial ATA RAID Controller CLI Guide for the Power Mac G5
Figure 3.  RAID 5 Configuration Example
                                      
RAID 10
RAID 10 is a combination of striped and mirrored arrays for fault tolerance 
and high performance.
When drives are configured as a striped mirrored array, the disks are 
configured using both RAID 0 and RAID 1 techniques, thus the name RAID 
10 (see Figure 4). A minimum of four drives are required to use this 
technique. The first two drives are mirrored as a fault tolerant array using 
RAID 1. The third and fourth drives are mirrored as a second fault tolerant 
array using RAID 1. The two mirrored arrays are then grouped as a striped 
RAID 0 array using a two tier structure. Higher data transfer rates are 
achieved by leveraging TwinStor and striping the arrays. 
In addition, RAID 10 arrays offer a higher degree of fault tolerance than other 
types of RAID levels (such as RAID 1 and RAID 5), since the array can 
sustain multiple drive failures without data loss. Please note that if both halves 
of a mirrored pair in the RAID 10 array fail, then all of the data will be lost.
Figure 4.  RAID 10 Configuration Example