16 GB SSD Swap rather then 8 GB Ram

[Rohit]

Hello Everybody.

I am planning to built a Free Nas based NAS for Home.

I have a problem. My Hardware doesn't support 8 GB of RAM can I use 16/32 GB SSD(SWAP) +4Gb RAM for ZFS.

or do I really need ZFS for 3 HDD of 2 GB each to use Software RAID.

 

[budmannxx]

Swap and RAM aren't interchangeable. You should follow the recommendations in the manual.

 

[jgreco]

Swap isn't much of a replacement for RAM. On a typical UNIX system, UNIX may swap processes out to swap space if there is too much memory pressure. On FreeNAS, the base system needs a certain amount of memory in which to hold its processes, and that may actually be a gigabyte, but there is also memory used for normal BSD kernel resources such as TCP buffers and lots of other fun stuff, which cannot be swapped. Further, ZFS also eats RAM, and cannot be swapped.

The swap space is really there "for emergencies", because it is possible that your system with too-little memory might panic and need a gob of RAM when doing the zfs import during boot. It would Really Really Suck Badly if your pool would refuse to import because the system ran out of virtual memory. The loss of disk space is fairly trivial.

 

[Rohit]

Thanks for response.

What about 4GB RAM and 320 GB HDD with ZFS. I need ZFS because I can not install Plugins without ZFS.

 

[jgreco]

I don't use plugins so I don't know if they require ZFS or not. However, 4GB is really too small for the ZFS defaults in FreeNAS, and then hoping that a plugin environment can also survive in there might be ... a bit optimistic.