Budget hardware recommendation with 10 GBit/s

[Davvo]

The general advice is to consider L2ARC when you either max your motherboard's capacity or have at least 64GB, with the understanding that using it with less than 64GB is likely to harm performance.

Most use cases don't benefit from L2ARC anyway, this this usually is shorted into "having at least 64GB of RAM allows you to consider L2ARC".

L2ARC is one of those features for professional applications, rarely useful for SOHO users.

 

[NickF]

Anyway, I think we may have beaten this topic to death by now…

This is exactly the reason these generalizations exist in the first place. Else, every single thread will turn into this conversation. There's nothing wrong with using sane defaults and following general guidance that work well for most situations.