On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 04:46:27PM -0700, ToddAndMargo wrote:
>
> ... that I ... get the most reliable SSD I can find and talk
> the customer out of RAID.
> 

This is bad thinking. "most reliable" does not mean "will never fail".

(leaving aside the question on how you can tell which brand is more
reliable, other than by vendor rosy promises or by counting of stars at newegg).

If you are building a system for a customer, you have to have a reasonable
answer to the question "if this SSD fails, do I lose all of everything?".

This means you have to have backups of everything and well tested instructions
on how to restore the full working system from these backups.

In my experience, mdadm RAID1 is the simplest way to build a system
that survives single device failure (SSD or HDD, does not matter),
but you still have to have backups and restoration instructions
because RAID1 does not protect against filesystem corruption,
against accidentally or maliciously deleted or modified files, etc.

-- 
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada