The only way I've found in mdadm to make 2 drives perform like a proper RAID 1 (eg. the read speed should be 2x that of a single drive) is to use the --layout=f2 (far 2).
mdadm raid10 performance issues.
Be very aware that mdadm seems to default to layout=n2 (which means near). In this scenario it means it is like mdadm RAID 1 performance (you get maximum read speeds of a single drive).
dd if=/dev/md126 of=/dev/null bs=1M cou........