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The bumpiness of the ride in a boat varies quite a lot depending on the boat and conditions. Putting a PC into a 20' runabout is quite a bit different than a 37' express cruiser, sailboat, trawler or sport boat.
If anything use laptop drives as they're rated to withstand greater G forces. Set 'em up in a software mirror so you don't have to worry about losing the whole thing if one of the drives packs up. Using an actual laptop as the basis of the system also buys you some benefits in dealing with interrmittent power or low voltage situations.
A boat sitting all day rafted up running off batteries is quite common and most boats have more than one battery (mine has three) to make sure you still have juice to start the engines.
Boat instrumentation systems have two standards and a whole slew of proprietary setups. The most common standard are NMEA-0183 and NMEA-2000. The former is a basically an RS-422 network running at 4800 baud and is really only designed to have a scant few devices talking on it. NMEA-2000 is relatively new and is designed for much faster performance and multiple talkers. Other systems use ethernet, often with UDP packets, but don't document their protocols. Just about everyone's got a way to bridge their networks to an RS-232 setup for a chartplotter on a PC.
I've currenly got my Raymarine E-80 set up bridged to a laptop running Coastal Explorer. At some point I plan on leaving a laptop permanently wired into the boat, doing the NMEA interfacing and acting as a WiFi access point. That'll let me use the laptop onboard without any wires.
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