ZFS doesn’t need much ram unless you have specific needs. People have run basic zfs storage machines on 4GB of memory total and it works fine. Even 2GB has been

ZFS doesn’t need much ram unless you have specific needs. People have run basic zfs storage machines on 4GB of memory total and it works fine. Even 2GB has been done before, but that’s a bit too low for me to suggest. Broadly, 16GB of total system is personal general recommended baseline, because honestly it’s simply too cheap not to have it. ZFS needs some amount of ram in order to even load the pool, this only becomes a practical concern when your pool gets into the 100’s of TiB. Deduplication, which should generally not be used, used to be awful with ram consumption, but these days isn’t nearly as bad and can be surprisingly viable. Dedupe can still cause unexpected performance issues unless your skillset is into digging into system analysis and tuning. You need some amount of RAM buffer for the write TXGs to coalesce efficiently. Generally not a concern. Finally there’s ARC, which is where all the nice things that improve your experience happen. The more the better, but just like system ram, once you have enough for your usage profile, you stop noticing much benefit beyond that. For dumb file storage, not that much is needed. Ideally you want enough to keep all the metadata, plus whatever your actual repeated read access would be. Working on video editing and VMs would require more RAM for a more optimal experience.