What is Windows 10 RAID 10? Here is your simple explanation.

Okay, so I’ve been wanting to beef up my storage game for a while now. You know, make sure my data’s safe and also get some speed boost. That’s where this whole RAID thing comes in. I heard about it from a buddy who’s way more into tech than I am. After a bit of digging around and trying to wrap my head around all the different RAID levels, I figured RAID 10 was the way to go for me on my Windows 10 machine.

First off, I made sure I had enough hard drives. For RAID 10, you need at least four. I had a couple of old ones lying around and bought two new ones. Better safe than sorry, right? Gotta make sure they’re all roughly the same size, or you’ll end up wasting space.

Before starting, I backed up all my important files on my Windows 10 computer to another external drive. I was not about to lose all my vacation photos and my important documents because of my ignorance.

Then, I installed all four drives into my PC. This part was a little bit tricky, had to open up the case and stuff, but I managed. Once they were in, I powered up my computer and went straight into the BIOS. This is where the magic happens. You usually get there by pressing F2 or Delete during startup.

In the BIOS, I looked for anything that said SATA Configuration or Storage Configuration, something along those lines. Then, I found the option to change the mode from AHCI to RAID. Saved the changes, and rebooted.

After the reboot, my computer showed a RAID configuration utility prompt. This is where I could finally set up my RAID array. There should be a key combination to enter the utility, usually something like Ctrl + I. Once I was in, I created a new RAID volume. The system then asked me to select my RAID level, so of course, I picked RAID 10.

Next, I selected all four of my drives to be part of this RAID 10 setup. This took a bit of time. The system had to initialize and sync everything up. But once it was done, I had my RAID 10 array ready to go.

Booted back into Windows, and I went to Disk Management. That’s where I could see my new RAID volume, but it was unallocated. So, I created a new simple volume, formatted it, assigned a drive letter, and bam, it was ready to use!

Now, I’ve got this big, fast, and redundant storage space. I copied all my files over, and everything’s been running smoothly. It feels good to know my data is safer, and the speed boost is definitely noticeable. I can work on my big projects without my computer lagging. Overall, setting up RAID 10 was a bit of a weekend project, but it was totally worth it.

This is just my experience with setting up RAID 10 on Windows 10. Hope this helps someone out there looking to do the same thing!

• RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks): A way to combine multiple hard drives into one to improve performance, data redundancy, or both.
• RAID 10: A RAID configuration that combines RAID 1 (mirroring) and RAID 0 (striping) to provide both data redundancy and improved performance.
• BIOS (Basic Input/Output System): Firmware used to perform hardware initialization during the booting process (power-on startup) on IBM PC compatible computers.
• AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface): A technical standard that specifies the operation of Serial ATA (SATA) host bus adapters.
• SATA (Serial ATA): A computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives and optical drives.
• Disk Management: A system utility in Windows that enables you to perform advanced storage tasks.