While RAID 10 and RAID 1 are both mirroring technologies that utilise half of the available drives for data, there's one crucial difference: the number of drives that can be used in a RAID group. RAID 1 involves only two drives that are mirrored to provide resilience in the event of a single disk failure. RAID 10 involves at least four drives, and creates a RAID 0 stripe set involving two or more RAID 1 mirrors.

Depending on the location of the drives, a RAID 10 configuration can recover from multiple drive failures while using the same percentage of data drives as RAID 1. It can also provide increased performance due to the increased number of spindles in the RAID group.