SOLVED 1600Mhz vs 1333Mhz

[Yummiesttag]

I have a dell optiplex 7020, I used my old ram which is 1333Mhz I wanted to upgrade from 8gb to 16gb because I have an 8TB drive and figured it would be good to have the overhead and it’s like $30. But would there be a benefit in using 1600Mhz? It would be well over double the $$ but if it’s double the performance then it could be worth it.

 

[Samuel Tai]

RAM speeds are a marketing gimmick, because the increased clock speeds are offset by looser timings for reliable operation. You'll see no performance jump whatsoever.

 

[Yummiesttag]

RAM speeds are a marketing gimmick, because the increased clock speeds are offset by looser timings for reliable operation. You'll see no performance jump whatsoever.

Awesome, thank you! Should I worry about upgrading to 16gb? I don’t plan to expand past 8TB right now and it’s primarily used for plex and lite file sharing.

 

[Yorick]

16GiB will help you, because you'll have more room for ARC, and thus can have the metadata ready in RAM. The system + Plex will use a good portion of those 8GiB you have, before you even start on ARC.

However, your mileage will vary. When in doubt, check Reporting->ZFS while you are still on 8GiB. Look at "ARC Hit Ratio" and "ARC requests demand_metadata". You want to see a hit ratio in the 90s and for metadata, way more hit than miss.

 

[Yummiesttag]

So I imagine this is good then? I’ll probably just get it to future proof it and because eventually I won’t be able to find the exact same sticks any more. I’d rather it all be matching.

 

[Samuel Tai]

2nd vote for 16 GB here. FreeNAS can stretch its legs much more with 16 and 8, and you'll get more caching on 16.

 

[Yummiesttag]

Thanks everyone for the help. I just ordered two more 4 gig sticks.

 

[Ericloewe]

RAM speeds are a marketing gimmick, because the increased clock speeds are offset by looser timings for reliable operation. You'll see no performance jump whatsoever.

It's not that simple. For typical DIMMs, latency in absolute terms trends down just little bit, even though in terms of cycles the number goes up.

That said, most NAS workloads aren't very sensitive to DRAM speeds.