I recently got a few (5) hard drives to turn my home server into a NAS with trueNAS scale and my idea is to have 4 usable and 1 for redundancy, my question is… How does RAID work, like what is RAID 0, RAID 5, software RAID etc, and does any of that even matter for my use case?
Seconded. ZFS needs to see the physical devices, so hardware RAID is out. It implements a RAID-5-like parity-based software solution called RAID-Z, and is capable of disk mirroring.
It can work with hardware RAID or with a single physical disk, but don’t expect it to last for a long time, and definitely don’t use it beyond testing.