&gt; That&#x27;s not a proper comparison as you are now using more disks in the RAID10 array than the RAID6 to get the same space.<p>You already have to use more disks for a RAID10 than in a RAID6, so I don&#x27;t see why this is that big of a deal.  Anything involving mirroring will involve at least a 50% cut in capacity (or more, such as with a 3-way or even 4-way mirror).  RAID1 and RAID10 don&#x27;t prioritize capacity; they prioritize robustness.<p>&gt; N-Parity setups are strictly more redundant than RAID10 for the same number of disks and required capacity.<p>But <i>not</i> more robust against failure, as I&#x27;ve already described (hopefully) rather clearly.  If we want to play this game, I can keep adding more disks per mirror, and now my worst-case will match that of your n-parity array while having a <i>vastly</i> better best-case (and, additionally, dragging the probability of that worst-case happening closer and closer to zero).  Remember: if you&#x27;re a RAID1 or RAID10 user who cares about disk capacity, you&#x27;re doing something wrong.<p>&gt; I mix and match vendors in RAID6 arrays just fine and it lowers the correlation of failures between disks just as well.<p>Do you mix and match all disks, though?  Because if you have at least three (in the case of RAID6) disks, no matter where they are in the array, that have the same failure curve (i.e. are the same model&#x2F;manufacturer), then you&#x27;re gonna have a bad time when the first one of them dies.<p>That&#x27;s my point.  In order to get the same inherent benefit as RAID10 here, you&#x27;d have to have a different vendor&#x2F;model for every single drive in your RAID6 array.<p>&gt; whenever you add more drives from different manufacturers you&#x27;re adding that redundancy to the whole array.<p>Only if they&#x27;re all different.  You&#x27;ll eventually get to the point where there aren&#x27;t enough manufacturers in the world (or you&#x27;ll be compromising on manufacturer diversity - which is, granted, what <i>most</i> people do).<p>&gt; With RAID10 if you have 3 drives per mirror your maximum redundancy before losing data is 3 manufacturers.<p>And that&#x27;s fine, because if one of those manufacturers sold me a defective batch, the problem&#x27;s isolated to that side of the mirror.  That&#x27;s my point; with RAID10, it&#x27;s no longer a game of sheer numbers of different models and manufacturers, but instead the more manageable strategy of giving each side of the mirror a different bathtub curve to ride, thus mitigating the chance of multiple hard drive batches failing at the same time.