

The safest and most flexible option would be to configure the BIOS to not use the RAID controller and just “see” the drives as a regular JBOD, and then setup a ZFS RAID-Z1 array and configure your zvols, etc. in that instead. RAID-Z1 is functionally very similar to old-school RAID-5. There’s virtually no performance penalty with software RAID these days, and you’re eliminating the proprietary RAID controller as a single point of failure.
Agreed. I think I’m fairly well read and I’ve worked through a decent number of philosophical texts, but I’ve never finished Walden.