instead of buying new hdds for raidz2 can i mix them? Like 2 x 16tb wd and 2 x 16tb seagate?
ZFS doesn’t care about brand names. It just cares about being fed with new block devices 
TrueNAS automatically partitions the drives so that all disks have the zfs partition with identical size. But you can always create your own partitions if there is trouble. We’re talking about some Megabytes here, which is more like a rounding issue than a real difference. I don’t see problem with both types being 16T capacity.
4 drives in total? Also consider using striped mirror (RAID 10), which has many advantages, for this instead of Z2.
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A VDEV must have the same size drives.
So I typically buy my drives in pairs.
Sometimes you’ll find 8 TiB drives for example that are 7.15 usable space and others like the He ones are 7.28 TiB usable.
^^^ As RAIDZ performance sucks. The speed of the entire VDEV is of the slowest drive in said VDEV.
So if you have the minimum of 4 drives for Z2 then you effectively have 1 HDD performance for writes.
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I dont care about writes, more read speed as well as parity. I was going to buy a 3rd or fourth exos, but i have like 6 backup drives I could shuck. I figure that might work?
Parity does not increase read speed, it is there to reduce risk by spreading out the risk.
So yeah it sounds like you want the highest data integrity at the cost of performance.
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I was going to make a second nas with nfs and samba. But now I’m thinking truenas in a vm would suffice.
Up until now my nas has been a 10 bay nas with 10 10tb drives. Now I’m looking at getting a second one for non media files. I. E Nextcloud data drive. I’d like parity and reliability over speed. I have multiple proxmox nodes so I was think of making my Nextcloud vm have the raid array.
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