Newbie question on storage layout

[gustavmustermann]

Hey all,
newbie here, I've just completed my first TrueNAS build (and my first NAS ever). My goal with this project is to store my personal photos and to learn more (I hope a lot) about NAS software, FreeBSD, sysadmin stuff, etc.

My Setup:
- Motherboard: Supermicro X11SCL-IF
- CPU: i3 8100
- RAM: 16GB ECC
- 2 x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf HDD -> mirrored vdev -> data pool (for important data)
- 120GB SSD -> intended as boot drive (no redundancy)
- 500GB SSD -> intended for applications and VMs (no redundancy -> non critical data, everything important will be stored on the data pool, if this drive fails I'll just set it up again)
- a 5TB external HDD for Backup

Use case:
- Nextcloud for documents, photos, calendar, etc.
- backup for laptop, phone
- experimenting with VMs and trying out docker in a linux VM
No big project, just wanting to try out cool new stuff and to learn a little. But I'd really want my personal data on the data-pool to be safe.

My questions:
- Is it safe to use just one disk for a "application-pool" that will only store non-critical application and VM data (can be lost at any time)? The only thing I care about is the data on the data-pool (two mirrored HDDs). I was just taken aback a little by the warning in the TrueNAS web interface when setting up the single-disk-striped-pool. As far as I understood, loosing this application-pool or the boot-pool (also no redundancy) is just an inconvenience, because I would have to set up my system (in case of the boot drive) or my applications and VMs (in case of the application drive) again (and with a backup of those two drives this shouldn't be too much of a problem).
- Is TrueNAS the right platform for my hardware and my use-case? I've researched a little and I preferred TrueNAS over plain Ubuntu, Proxmox, OpenMediaVault or Unraid because it seems to me that TrueNAS main objective is data integrity (and not e.g. virtualization with Proxmox)

Thanks a lot in advance for your time :) ! I really, really appreciate you all for helping all the newbies like me out there with their silly questions (that have probably been answered a thousand times before. I've searched the forum but I've found no one with this question).
I hope my question is clear and precise and that I've included everything thats needed in my message.

 

[JohnDigital]

Its strongly recommended to use a mirror or better just for the inconvenience you mention, some installs might be quite large and applications are mission critical to most. You'll be better able to understand once you get going what a pain it actually is to recover from a disk failure, poof, gone. In a server environment you should really consider mirroring everything up at minimum. However, in your instance, to learn, mess around or whatnot, what you are planning to do will be fine. Until its not one day, out of nowhere. But if you are ok with that, then by all means you should go for it. But my advice remains would be to mirror up the boot disk, and the jail disk and get cracking.

Truenas is great, and your hardware is perfectly fine to run it.