RAID for internal (Data only) drives: ZFS or mdadm

[SomeDudeInAZ]

As I'm getting ready for a move to 21.3 I'm looking into possably "raiding" some of my internal drives.

Boot/root/home drive I always keep out of the raid, and I keep all my actual data on separate drives. Currently everything is jbod ext4 (mnt/a, mnt/b, etc). Backups are good

Since I have 4 data drives (SSDs) turning them into raid5 (mdadm) / raidz (zfs) is do-able.

This is a standard desktop machine (web, email, docs, some gaming, etc), so it's more about getting some level of redundancy with working (as opposed to archival) data. In both cases a strong competitor is just plugging in a usb drive and doing a daily luckybackup (in addition to my weekly). Heck I might do that anyway in addition to raid.

My question revolves around zfs - it appears that it needs a fair amount of tuning to be effective. Is this true? Am I completely overthinking this?