The Gen8 Microserver needs a P222 so that it's reported to the iLO properly.
I wouldn't really want to fudge it :-)
These 4 drives were originally in a 4 bay QNAP using RAID 5 but the QNAP is ARM based and very slow, so I migrated to the Gen8.
If I duplicate everything, then I need 4 more drives - which means I also need a controller card and an external bay. Too much expense when what I have now will last me for several years since I have 6Tb free. It's just not worth all that expense to cover the loss of one drive. To be honest, if I was looking at parity then I'd have gone the hardware raid 5 route, so that I only had 25% overhead. I know that brings its own problems, and I've had RAID 5 arrays in my datacentre which lost 2 drives and required restores from backups.
Sooo... you're not gonna convince me to spend out all that money on duplication! hehehe!
Well since everything on my 4x4Tb drives is media and is ultimately replaceable (albeit with some time and effort!) then I came to the conclusion that having an extra 3.6Tb of available space at the expense of a drive failure is acceptable.
I'm impressed with the scanner. When I copied the data off the Storage Spaces array so that I could set up DrivePool instead, I had to use a multitude of small 1Tb and 500Gb drives that I had laying around.
I knew at least one of the 1Tb drives was acting strangely (it worked but seemd a bit "odd" at times) and as soon as I plugged it in, I got an email from the Scanner reporting S.M.A.R.T. issues. Therefore it seems to be doing its job.
Given the above, hopefully anything other than an instant complete drive failure should give me time to get the data off any drive which begins to show problems.
Also, as you mention if I do have data I want backing up then I can just dupe those folders.
All good for me, because Storage Spaces is awful - I deleted a load of stuff, and it doesn't rebalance, so you end up with uneven drives. They are not readable individually either. My other option was to add a P222 controller card to my Gen8, but that's a pretty expensive option and would cost at least twice what I paid for the Gen8 itself!
I can highly recommend Drivepool and Scanner from what I've seen so far :-)