Need help! RAID 10- Simple, Spanned, Striped or Mirrored?

[punkalooy]

I just created a RAID 10 setup. I'm "Managing" my drives in the Computer Management section of windows 8.1 but I'm not sure which one to choose for this particular setup- Simple, Spanned, Striped or Mirrored? I'm assuming striped but I just want to be sure.

I would also like to partition the 4TB(4x 2TB total in RAID 10) in half to two drives. Is that possible at this point?

 

[popatim]

I'm confused... you start off saying its already created but your question involves creating it.
If you are creating it, whats your strategy to backup your data? Raid is not a replacement for backups.

Anyways...
striped is raid 0
mirrored is raid 1

Create two striped arrays and them mirror one array to the other one = raid 10

Just remember that if you, a virus, someone, deletes an important - file its gone from the mirror just as fast - hence the need for backups.

 

[Techpumpkin_WD]

Hello, from what you described it seems your using Windows dynamic volumes to create your RAID setup. I need to warn you that in such case having a good backup strategy is really important as the dynamic volumes are managed by Windows and if anything goes wrong with your OS installation you will loose all the information stored on all the drives. And information is nearly impossible to recover after that.
As for the different setup options:

Simple – well this is pretty much as having a few separate basic volumes.

Spanned – this would be a single volume (partition) that spreads on more than one physical HDD.

Striped – consists of 2 or more physical disks where data is written divided between the different HDDs. It allows faster read and write speeds but effectively doubles the chances of losing the data, because if one of the drives fails all the data is lost.

Mirrored – When you have 2 physical drives and all the data is simultaneously written to both of them. This provides good redundancy, because of one of the HDDs fails the other will continue working. However this is not considered a backup option as both HDDs share the same physical location.

RAID 10 is a combination of two stripped sets that are mirrored. Once you create your RAID in Windows you wont be able to partition the volume further.

Good luck .