TrueNAS System Requirements

I’ve briefly read that TrueNAS wants a minimum of 8GB of RAM, but as much RAM as possible. After having installed it on my personal Dell R420 12-core server, I totally get that. But for a successful install, how many cores/speed is really necessary for great performance? 12-cores seems excessive to me for the application, but I’ll need that as I move into VMs once more RAM becomes available.

If I were to build a TrueNAS for a client, what are would the bare minimum core count/speed look like?

I guess it depends on the requirements? For backups only checkout Lawrence Systems’ review of the 2 core 8 GB ram FreeNAS mini E (link)

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It all comes down to use case and how many jails/VM you want to run. personally i would not run critical VM in Truenas.
One of my Truenas setup is way over kill for me, I have setup three systems that i manage.
one R410 12 core with 8GB of ram serving a small office, no jails. it works great.
the second system is a R710 12 core with 24GB for backups, it runs Syncthing and does a replication pull every day of the R410.

My home system is a R720XD 12 core and 96GB of ram running 21 jail, a few VM’s and 40G networking. I do iSCSI/nfs for my lab storage.

I can tell none of the systems get taxed for what thy do. Before the R720XD it was a R710 12 core 96GB of ram it was taxed a little bit, and the R720XD doing the same stuff at a lower clock spends it day idling at least until it starts to transcoding.
Could i get away with 8GB of ram and 40G networking, probably not. serving up a large database definitely not.

What are your plans for this Truenas build?

File sharing. I think it really shines there. I’ve done SMB stuff with Debian in the past, but the TrueNAS GUI makes it stupid simple, nearly a turn-key installation. Around 20-35 users (less these days, but the cap is around 35).

Look at the Truenas Mini its a Dual-core C3338 Intel CPU with 8 GB ECC RAM. I am sure its more then enough for basic file sharing like word docs and things on a Gigabit network for a small office.
The R410 system right know serves about 10 office people, when you open up the mapped hard its like opening up a local drive nice and snappy. so far i have not complaints. its definitely a upgrade from there old Qnap with 8g of ram

I appreciate the pre-built stuff, but the issue I have is that I like rack-mount stuff. Makes things much tidier. I honestly think it’d be just fine to essentially replicate my home build, R420 2x6 core, 16GiB RAM ($120 on ebay), and then just snag storage drives, probably around $500 total. $600+ for a storage solution as robust as TrueNAS is pocket change, I think…

If all you want is just SMB file sharing, you can get away with a dual core and 8 gb of RAM. Not running TrueNAS or ZFS, but my HP ProLiant MicroServer G8 has the a Celeron dual core and 10 GB of RAM, runs CentOS and Samba for 70 people. During heavy use, it doesn’t go over 2 GB. In the last 24h, my monitoring system tells me it didn’t go over 30% CPU utilization (closeup on that timeframe and it says 32.46%, because that’s how averages work in monitoring graphs) and that happened when I rclone was running. System Load is constantly <1. Top RAM usage was 4.43 GB (during rclone), cached 2.86 GB, buffered 1.84 GB.

At the time of writing this post, it shows 320M used and 472M buff/cache.

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