You must have shingled/SMR drives. They do not work well with any type of raid array.

My array of 7x12TB drives resilvers in a few hours, as I made sure I got CMR drives

No, but that is an option if you dont have the hardware to self host it. I have it on one of my vms on my server in the basement.

EDIT: I just took another look at the github repo and it kind of looks like you can’t just selfhost it, but you can, the main readme is just a little confusing. Click on the “Setup your CouchDB” link in the manual section and the selfhosted via docker guide is there.

You should take a look at the selfhosted live sync plugin for obsidian. It’s been working flawlessly for me for the past year.