RAM Requirements

[António Henriques]

Hi

I'm planning in using FreeNAS os an hardware the only supports 4GB RAM, with the 1 drive for FreeNAS, and plus 2 in mirror or 3 in raid-z1
I know that 4GB RAM is below the minimum requirements, I would like to know what can I expect with only this amount of RAM, if it's a critical problem and I'm in risk of losing data, or if it's only related performance.

Best Regards,
António Henriques

 

[icsy7867]

You are the low side of things. I have heard many generalized rules here. Some say 16GB or bust, but another rule I have heard is 4GB + 1GB/TB of storage. So if you have 3x 1TB drives, you should be looking at a "requirement" of 7GB of ram.

You also should really be running ECC memory. I recently had to wipe one of my zpool's because I had an error in meta-data which I am fairly confident was a ram issue. I ordered 16GB DDR3 ECC memory right after! with the way ZFS works (And I am no expert), it is RAM hungry. And by hungry I mean starving. It will use as much ram as you give it and I think you are going to run into some problems with only 4GB.

You may want to look into FreeNAS's sister product Nas4Free.
http://www.freenas.org/freenas-vs-nas4free/

There are other alternatives out there as well that will stick to the more conventional Raid1/5/6/10 etc, that will be far less ram hungry. But I must say, after getting a decent freenas setup and learning how to use IOHYVE/BHYVE and the jail system I dont know if I can use anything else in the future. My FreeNas box does Plex, Owncloud, 2x Deluge clients, Openvpn access and some other things. I love it and you can get a decent setup for only a few hundred dollars.

 

[m0nkey_]

Hi

I'm planning in using FreeNAS os an hardware the only supports 4GB RAM, with the 1 drive for FreeNAS, and plus 2 in mirror or 3 in raid-z1
I know that 4GB RAM is below the minimum requirements, I would like to know what can I expect with only this amount of RAM, if it's a critical problem and I'm in risk of losing data, or if it's only related performance.

Best Regards,
António Henriques

4GB is half of what is recommended. 8GB is what you should be aiming for so you don't suffer performance issues or data loss. We have seen instances on this forum where people have been running less than recommended and lost data. ZFS is memory hungry, the more RAM you can provide it the better it will perform. I think in your case you'll be better off with a Ubuntu box running Samba.

 

[danb35]

4GB is half of what is recommendedrequired.

Fixed that for you. The minimum RAM requirement for any recent version of FreeNAS is 8 GB. Besides that, any hardware that only supports 4 GB is going to be ancient enough to not be anywhere close to suitable anyway.

 

[anodos]

4GB is half of what is recommended. 8GB is what you should be aiming for so you don't suffer performance issues or data loss. We have seen instances on this forum where people have been running less than recommended and lost data. ZFS is memory hungry, the more RAM you can provide it the better it will perform. I think in your case you'll be better off with a Ubuntu box running Samba.

QFT, but I'd probably use OpenBSD rather than ubuntu. :p
CentOS is also very good and stable. I prefer CentOS 6.

 

[António Henriques]

Thanks all for the replys. I'm going to test other alternatives since I have to stay with my current hardware... Budget issues...

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Here's something else you might want to try: http://www.mynas.com.au/
Seems to be built on CentOS, and the minimum requirements are lower than for FreeNAS.

 

[pirateghost]

Here's something else you might want to try: http://www.mynas.com.au/
Seems to be built on CentOS, and the minimum requirements are lower than for FreeNAS.

Ouch. My eyes.

I would recommend openmediavault over that...

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

It's definitely aimed at a different audience than FreeNAS.

 

[m0nkey_]

Here's something else you might want to try: http://www.mynas.com.au/
Seems to be built on CentOS, and the minimum requirements are lower than for FreeNAS.

It's still ZFS, so it will still be memory intensive. OMV as mentioned by @pirateghost would be a better option.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

It's ZFS on Linux, which does not call for a minimum of 8GB.The minimum required RAM is specified as 2GB and minimum recommended is 4GB. MyNAS is a tightly constrained environment that makes a lot of decisions for you, yet it has cloud backup and Xen hypervisor built in. Seems like it might be a good fit for the OP if new hardware it not an option.

 

[SweetAndLow]

It's still ZFS, so it will still be memory intensive. OMV as mentioned by @pirateghost would be a better option.

Zfs does not require a high amount of RAM. It will work just fine with 1GB but you will be sacrificing performance because the arc is stored in memory and usually important to people. But if performance isn't your goal and you just want features like snapshots then it will be fine.