spuos: bit late to the chat but from what you described omnios is a good fit - run some of the stuff in the GZ and other bits in zones / bhyve depending on how you want things split up

there's also an #omnios channel (although you might find many of the same people in here)

possibly a bit late but there's also raidz or raidz2 for your data disks (raidz might be more risk with larger spinning drives) but raidz2 might give better redundany and I'm not sure there's much of a performance hit

also I'm sure many of us have done silly things in the past. My general principle is that the only silly questions are the ones you don't ask.

mlari: IMHO raidz2 is not a great fit for 4 disks.

m1ari: ooh, I didn't think raidz was good for random writes. That said, thanks for the advice

sommerfeld: how about 6? I plan on some day rebuilding with 2 more and moving the OS from one of the sata slots to an NVME slot.

spuos: That's IMHO about the smallest config where it makes sense.

sommerfeld: It's been years since I did this, but I feel like the failure recovery probability for 4-way raidz2 was better than a 3-way mirror