The safest and most flexible option would be to configure the BIOS to not use the RAID controller and just “see” the drives as a regular JBOD, and then setup a ZFS RAID-Z1 array and configure your zvols, etc. in that instead. RAID-Z1 is functionally very similar to old-school RAID-5. There’s virtually no performance penalty with software RAID these days, and you’re eliminating the proprietary RAID controller as a single point of failure.

oh good point (and not entirely obvious).

Not like we can stop it. If it’s online and not behind some kind of auth it’s getting slurped.

Ah that makes sense. So federation implies copying essentially, and not merely linking. Thanks!