Which RAID configuration combines striping and mirroring?

RAID 10, also known as RAID 1+0, combines the techniques of striping and mirroring to offer both increased performance and redundancy. In RAID 10, data is first mirrored across pairs of disks, ensuring that if one disk fails, the data is still available on the other disk in the pair. This mirroring provides fault tolerance. On top of that, striping is applied across the mirrored sets, which enhances read and write speeds by spreading data across multiple disks. As a result, RAID 10 utilizes the strengths of both mirroring (for reliability) and striping (for performance), making it a popular choice for critical applications that require both speed and data protection.

In contrast, RAID 0 only involves striping without any redundancy, while RAID 1 only involves mirroring without combining it with striping. RAID 5 offers striping with parity, which provides fault tolerance but doesn't include mirroring as part of its configuration. Therefore, RAID 10 uniquely integrates both strategies, making it the correct choice for this question.