lazyslacker

I've found that people who worry that they have bad handwriting typically have very good, legible handwriting. This is true with a lot of things actually. If you care about it, chances are you're above average already. It's only people who don't care and thus you don't hear from at all about it who are truly bad at something.

You can still find the mind enriching parts if you look. It's a neutral communication medium at this point, the barriers to entry just don't really exist anymore. People use it how they will. Dumb people will use it in dumb ways. 50% of people are dumber than the average person. That's a lot of people.

Get a cheap SSD for a boot drive. I think your only option given your constraints and your goal is use all three in a RAIDZ1. There's no real problem with using different kinds of drives in one pool. With this setup though you'll lose the use of 2TB of capacity on the 4TB drive. 2x2TB + 1x4TB won't work because you'll have no redundancy on the 4TB.

Edit: just realized you meant the 4tb could be mirrored to the 2+2 configured as a striped array. I think that could work, just have to see what truenas supports setting up. That would still meet your criteria of being able to lose one of them. Perhaps the ease of rebuilding a mirror compared to a RAIDZ1 would somewhat cancel out the doubled risk of the 2+2 failing. You'd only have 50% capacity, which in terms of number of usable tb the same as the raidz1 I suggested above.

I think personally I'd go RAIDZ1 as it seems more straight forward to set up but both of these options work.

The calculations necessary to rebuild a failed drive from parity data stored on the other drives means that for the duration of the time that the array is being rebuilt (aka "resilvered"), you'll have high activity on the other drives. So during that time there's an increased chance that a drive that was already on the brink of failure is pushed over the edge. If that happens, your data is gone. Like I said it depends on your risk tolerance. You may not feel like it's worth it in your situation. I personally only run a raidz1. I accept the risk that entails, just as people who use raidz2 accept the increased risk that entails over raidz3. There's no limit to the amount of redundancy you can add. The level of redundancy that's needed is a decision that only you/your organization can make.

I'd say it depends on your circumstances and your tolerance to the possibility of data loss. The general answer to the question is that without using some kind of redundancy, either mirrored disks or RAID, the failure of a single disk would mean you lose your data. This is true for each copy of your data that you have.

Off-site backup is the proper answer to your question. All this really depends on your own tolerance or comfort with the possibility of losing data. The rule of thumb is that there should be at least three different copies of your data, each in a different physical location. For each of them, there should be redundancy of some kind implemented to guard against hardware failure. Redundancy is typically achieved by using mirrored drives or by using RAID of some kind. Also, if you'd like to know, using RAID in which you can only lose one disk in the array is not typically considered a sufficient level of protection because of the possibility of a cascading drive failure during replacement of a failed disk. It should be at least two.

It's been years since I dual booted. If you want Windows to be default I'm struggling to think of what could be gained by dual booting over just running your Linux system in a vm in Windows.

At this point you get into a philosophical discussion about what "right" really means