if you start building beyond one drive then you will need to include redundancy, which is fine… so long as you know what you are doing…
however raid is slow on the iops side of things, ofc it can be good for data integrity if done right… but if you are new to raid you may as well end up doing something you will regret…
also you do know that nodes doesn’t just magically fill up with data right… over the last 3 months we’ve gotten maybe a few tb at best… hopefully that will change soon…
i run 3 pool’s with 1 of them being a 2x4 drive raidz1 and my two other new nodes being on mirrors because i kinda hated the iops i was getting from the raid setup…
you think you want raid… because it’s enterprise and fancy… but it’s often will cause you more trouble than it solves because you will have a ton to learn about it.
if you do decide to do raid, you should only use raid1 or raid6…or you could do raid 10 and raid 60 (but that may be a bit larger than what you are thinking off i suspect). or maybe hybrid raid5 solutions which corporate checksums, or you can use something like zfs, maybe btrfs, but i cannot say how reliable btrfs is but some people use it…
that doesn’t make it reliable tho
straight up raid0 or raid5 should be avoided, it’s just plain bad long term
so just setup a couple of nodes one on each drive and see how that goes… if you got that much hardware to throw at it, you can always setup more later, when you get a bit involved with the project.
you might also want to do other projects on the hardware, so keeping some stuff free until you know your plans might be very wise.