The best part of Linux (imho) is the ability to replicate not only the operating system or the data but also the boot loader. This allows you to have two identical disks running RAID-1, each of which are independently bootable, should one of them fail. You can also add spare disks to the RAID-1 array to automatically use it to reconstruct the RAID-1 array when one of the RAID-1 disks fail. However configuring it may not always be the simplest. Let's see if I can simplify it for you. The boot partition (primary partition) can be RAID-0 or RAID-1. Only a fool would configure the boot device as RAID-0 and double the chance of failure. However when you configure it as RAID-1, you are making your boot device 100% redundant and hence robust. BTW: Can you boot on a RAID-1 drive in Windows? ... NO.