My understanding is that raid1 doubles the writes,but can speed up the reads a lot.
How large is your database and how fast can you make backups of it?
I also thought RAID0 (striping only) made it MORE likely you could have a problem,i.e.
one volume is lost and its good bye data.
One of the unexpected I/O oddities of Ec2 EBS volumes, is the first time you write to your
EBS disk, it takes like 2x longer, than any subsequent write. I do a disk fillup to 50%
with just dd if=/dev/zero of=/newdisk/bigfile1 bs=1024m count=1024, then wipe the big files
and afterwards writes take more normal speeds.
This is a good ec2 dev forum article on ec2 disk I/O specifics.
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=220860
and this says EBS disks are bad for raid10
Amazon EC2 Disk Performance | AF-Design
Feb 27, 2009 ... If you have a high number of reads or writes, which you likely do .... Pingback: Amazon EC2 Disk Performance and Why RAID 10 is bad for EBS ...
http://af-design.com/blog/2009/02/.../amazon-ec2-disk-performance/