My two bits,
Using a flash drive (thumb drive) as the boot has limited feasible usage.  I have built this way as a security method.  However, thumb drives, as I recall, are prone to failure more so than regular hard drives.  As to what gets moved, the grub can be the only thing so long as it knows where to find the boot partition for the image.  There is more technical info ofc but that is the basic jist.  Given that raid 1 is mirroring the four partitions on each drive it is, by it's nature, the protection against failing hard drives as when one drive fails the other is happily booting thus giving you the opportunity to change out the failed drive.  Another option is to keep a recovery thumb drive with the necessary Raid tools for your system.  That is the beauty of Linux - options.  I would not recommend regular booting to thumb drive.  HIH.

-- Fred

On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 12:34 PM, Jeffrey Ross <jeff@bubble.org> wrote:
Looking for some feedback and some direction on not only the feasibility but does it makes sense to do.

The scenario is this, this is Fedora 26 system, running RAID1 on all disk partitions, there are only 2 disks in the system with 4 raid partitions each:

/dev/md125    /      - md125 : active raid1 sdb1[2] sda1[0]
/dev/md127    /boot  - md127 : active raid1 sdb3[1] sda3[0]
/dev/md124    /home  - md124 : active raid1 sdb5[1] sda5[0]
/dev/md126    [swap] - md126 : active raid1 sdb2[3] sda2[2]

The thought is to use flash of some sort to do the initial boot (eg USB flash) and then continue with the boot using the installed disks.  If this is the case is it the /boot partition that gets moved to flash?  is it grub that gets moved?  Or is it both?  /boot is currently using about 174MB.

The thought behind this to protect against a disk failure and being unable to boot on the remaining good disk, flash being solid state I would assume it would be more reliable, plus since I'm not looking to constantly write to the partition "wearing out" the media wouldn't be an issue.

USB device I was thinking about is Z-U130 eUSB SSD, they appear to be available as 1, 2, 4, & 8 GB modules.

Thanks, Jeff
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