StarWind Software

On the Recommended RAID Settings page https://knowledgebase.starwindsoftware. ... ssd-disks/, it says that RAID 10 should be used with a number of drives that's a power of 2 (4, 8, 16, etc.). Is that really the case? Wouldn't RAID 10 as a standard be fine with any even amount of drives starting at 4? I don't have the drives on hand to test this right now or I would just test it to see what the web UI let me do.

That's a good one. It is a "must" but a "should" thing.
Sure, you can create a RAID with a different number of disks. Yet, according to the performance tests, we noticed a slight performance increase when the number of disks aligns with the formula.

While RAID 10 functions perfectly fine with any even number of drives (4, 6, 8, 10, 12, etc.), some RAID controllers or software implementations might achieve slightly better performance or more balanced I/O distribution when the number of drives is a power of 2 (4, 8, 16, etc.).

Some RAID controllers might be optimized to handle I/O operations more efficiently when they can divide the workload evenly among a power-of-2 number of underlying mirrored sets.

That's a good point.