Hello
As always, "it depends" is the answer. It depends on your desired performance requirements and needed capacity. RAID10 will give you the best performance and (possibly) greater risk avoidance from drive failures but the worst capacity efficiency. RAID6 will give you pretty good protections against failures but won't perform quite as well (especially on writes) but you'll get better capacity efficiency. I'd probably do a single RAID6 logical disk and choose the 8th disk as a spare. This will give you 5 disks worth of capacity instead of the four you'd get with RAID10 but also gives you extra protection by having the spare ready to go in case of drive failure. Or, you could use all 8 drives in a RAID6 get 6 drives worth of capacity so long as you are monitoring the system carefully and replacing failed drives quickly.
If it were me, I wouldn't waste two 2TB physical drives for OS. If they were smaller drives then maybe but it's a waste of space and you are taking away space and performance from the RAID group that will be created with the remaining 6.
In terms of protecting the drives, it would be the same as any data center equipment. Be gentle with it, take static control measures, avoid shocks/drops, and keep it in a room with proper temperature and humidity.
If you're using a Generation 8 server then I'm guessing you are either repurposing it or bought it used. In either case, if the server had been running for a couple years then shut off, shipped, whatever; it's not unusualy to have some drives that don't start back up again if they've been running continuously for years.
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