Assuming identical hardware -- Raid 10 or 1E

Which would be the "better" raid configuration for performance and failure protection.

Raid 10 or 1E

Assuming identical hardware for both situations
* a hardware raid card (an adaptec 3805, 8 port internal SAS)
* four identical hard drives

opinions please

As usual, the better configuration choice for performance will depend upon the eventual usage.

The main difference between 1E and 10 is that 1E uses an odd number of disk for providing protection, where as 10 uses an even number of disk.
Raid 1E requires min of 3 disk, and Raid 10 requires a min of 4 disk.
They should perform similarly....all else equal of course.

heres a good illustration of how 1e works

Raid1e is some marketing crap to signify their implementation of raid10 will work on odd number of drives as well. Its still just raid10. There isn't "raid10 or raid1e", its the same thing.

"1E uses an odd number of disk for providing protection" -- can use, it can also use even.

So then raid 1e does exist..

since raid 10 is even disks
raid 1e is odd # of disks

since raid 10 cant be uneven number of disks, they gave it a different name..

Now that being said, it was stupid....

since it is really the same in the end, just call it all raid 10 and say the min amount of disks is 3.

Actually, RAID1E and RAID10 are not the same, depending on the implementation. On some, RAID1E is actually RAID1 with active hotsparing. (Literally, it's a RAID1 set which keeps an active second mirror, but follows RAID1 mirror strategy between two disks. It's quite silly.)

The simplest way to understand the typical RAID1E is this, though: standard RAID1 and 10 are vertically split. Especially RAID10. Looks like this:
| D1 | D2 | D1 | D2 |
| D3 | D4 | D3 | D4 |

RAID1E stripes horizontally, like this:
| D1 | D2 | D3 |
| D2 | D3 | D1 |
| D3 | D1 | D2 |

So it's not RAID10. RAID10 is really 0+1 though people pretend 0+1 and 10 are different; they're not. They're both mirroring a stripe set.

You can lay the data out however you want, look at Linux Kernel's raid10 implementation for some awesomeness. You want to create a new raid level name for way of laying out data? Its all raid10. Raid1e is marking bs.