I'm tasked with building a highly-reliable, unmanned industrial PC that will withstand unplanned power outages. A UPS will be used where possible, but realistically we know that many of these units will be installed without UPS.
I initially set out with RAID 1 in mind for our PC - I figured redundant drives should make sure the OS lives on, even if one drive fails. That said, we're using reliable industrial SSDs - perhaps this isn't really the weak link I should be looking at.
I then realized that for our class of machine, they are pretty much all using intel BIOS RAID, i.e. FakeRAID. I investigated this further, and found many saying that SoftRAID is better. Okay, fair enough - I'll go softRAID then... but then further research has seemed to indicate to me that this isn't necessarily going to give me much protection against the corruption of my OS, and infact it may even complicate matters. If one of my reliable drives fails, and it happens to be the one with Grub, I won't even boot - even though in theory I've got redundant drives.
So - all this to say I'm coming to the conclusion that SoftRAID 1 for my primary OS disk may actually introduce more failure points than its worth, i.e. it won't make the system appreciably more reliable and it introduces new vulnerabilities. Is this a fair assessment or am I missing something?
I'm thinking that a reliable drive with EXT4 may be as good as I'm going to get.
