Absolute TureNAS RAM Requirnments

Operating Systems & Open Source BSD
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I am currently building a TrueNAS server to store my Movie and TV Show collection, I would like to run Plex and maybe some containers and a couple of VM’s but they are Not essential.

The Specs are as Follows

Threadripper 1900x 8c/16t
Asrock X399 Tiachi
RAM TO COME
Nvidia Quadro K2200
Asus m.2 Hyper NVMe Card
4x 1TB Samsung PM963 NVMe SSD
4x 14TB SAS
4x 12TB SATA
4x 10TB SATA
24 Bay Rackmount Case
16 Port Adaptec 7 Series JBOD RAID Card

On the Hard Drive side I am going with 2 drive mirrors on the drives as I will be adding new drives 2 at a time at the end of every month.

The 4x1TB NVMe are for VM Disks, containers, and hopefully storing the plex metadata so I can keep the drives in standby mode and once I press play in Plex the drive will spin up, haven’t figured that one out yet?

On the RAM Side I had bought 4x32GB of Registered ECC for about 130 euro/dollars which was great and i could get another 4 if needed, but only unbuffered DIMM’s work on Threadripper and they are more expensive 400 euro for 4x16GB DIMMS.

The budget is very low as I had to purchase a new Workstation as the Threadripper 1900x is the new server, I got a 3900x system.

Anyway as my use case above is only filling the server with media with me and a friend using plex and some VM’s and Containers which I could do on the 3900x system could I get by with 64GB of RAM with 144 TB of Hard Drives space in my ZFS config?

I used unraid and did not like it maybe TrueNAS is over kill and there is some pedestrian version for me the budget only has 400 left and I don’t want to liquidate the 3900x system because I need 256GB of unbuffered dimms, especially as I am putting another 12x 12TB drives over the next few months.

It may be an option to sell the Threadripper and buy a Xeon server motherboard because the RAM is so cheap

Input much appreciated

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You will be fine with 64GB of RAM, just of course watch out you don’t use it all with VM’s!

Obviously the more the better, but I don’t think you’re going to have an issue

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You may want to look up driver support for that Adaptec card otherwise I guess it looks fine albeit a bit overkill unless your VMs uses a lot of CPU time

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I agree with @FunnyPossum on the memory.

But I would suggest using 1-2 NVMe drives for L2ARC or special vdev. SATA SSD for special vdev will do fine as well if you have some available and dont want to use NVMe.

Pool capacity is rather large with 3x 4-wide RaidZ1 (presumably) and around 100T capacity (yeah media doesn’t use that much, but 100T media is still a lot of blocks), so expect a lot of metadata. Taking the burden off your memory with L2 and/or special vdev. This also ensures good performance on higher capacity utilization and the corresponding fragmentation that comes along with it, and negates the worst random read deficits of RaidZ pools.

It will be fine regardless. But if you want a carefree experience and put it in some corner and just run it for years, using zvols and large VM images or fear of fragmentation >70%, invest some SSD to cover all bases.

And about the memory: get 2x32GB UDIMMs. So you can upgrade memory later if you feel like you need it, more memory more better.
TR 1900x has 4 channels? Don’t worry about bandwidth, home server is fine with 2 channels unless you have some very special VMs running.