I inherited a decommissioned Dell PowerEdge T610 from my work recently. I have it setup with Truenas and plan to have it be our new Jellyfin, file storage, and whatever else I can figure out. But I’m new to Raid setups and was hoping for advice before proceeding. After doing a little research I figured a Raid 5 configuration would be a fun experiment and could help with stability in the long run.

My question is, should I manage drives via the hardware controller? Or Truenas?

The server has a hardware raid controller and the drives have to be configured in the bios in order to be visible by an OS. Easy enough. I setup 4 drives in a Raid 5 configuration, boot to Truenas. I try to make a pool with the vdrive but then Truenas wants to configure it. If I chose anything other than Raid 0 it would cut into the storage even more. So I went back in, changed the 4 drives to Raid 0 in the bios, then setup the pool in Truenas using the 4 individual vdrives. But then I started to wonder if the two would be compatible in the long run?

Then in wondered, is Raid 5 even worth it? I have a single drive I currently use as a direct backup of our important photos, videos, etc. That one is not going in the array but will be copied over for easy access and kept as a backup. So with a direct backup of the important stuff do I really need to sacrifice space for mirroring and parity?

I’m curious what you all think.