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I never really understood the system requirements for FreeNAS. It would be something that would work great on some small old system, but at 8gb Recommended the
by mawburn 10y ago
I never really understood the system requirements for FreeNAS. It would be something that would work great on some small old system, but at 8gb Recommended the system requirements is basically the opposite of a small old system.
Can anyone explain the reason for this? What makes the specs so hardcore?
- usefulcat 10y agoI think the short answer is that ZFS doesn't work well unless it has a decent amount of memory available for caching.
- peatmoss 10y agoThe website isn't loading for me, but if I remember correctly the default FS is ZFS, which likes its memory.
- singlow 10y agoI think the memory is for ZFS which needs a lot of memory to perform well.
- andoriyu 10y agoSimple. ZFS has memory requirements to operate efficiently. If you have less <8Gb of RAM, which is by the way as small as it gets, then you probably have not a lot of drives, therefore won't benefit from ZFS nor FreeNAS. Kind of like when you don't need a full blown CRM to manage two customers.
- guitarbill 10y agoIt's just a recommendation. Remember, some people use FreeNAS professionally, so they're going to err on the side of recommending too much (= enterprise). Less will probably work fine, as long as you aren't running dedupe, compression, or heaps of jails and services. E.g. if you have 4 drives and just use the SMB service to connect to one or two machines, 4GiB is probably okay. Having said that, RAM is pretty cheap. 8GiB isn't a huge ask for any machine in 2016. Any system with less than 4GiB, is it really worth bothering with redundancy/ZFS? UFS (which is far less RAM hungry) + nightly backups might be good enough. (Edit: of course, you miss out on the awesome ZFS features with UFS. It's never easy, is it?)