I have had my current FreeNAS system for nearly 6 years. My motherboard is an ASUS P9D-V with an Intel Xeon E3-1225V3 Haswell 3.2 GHz CPU and 32GB of RAM. As I couldn't afford nor did I know I'd need as much storage as I currently do, I added more Volumes as the need arose. I currently have four volumes, each with four drives in a RAIDZ-1 configuration. Yes, I know I could have done better had I known then what I know now, but I really don't want to make radical and expensive changes. I just noticed something though that makes me a little concerned. Out of my 32 GB, 21.5 GB is being used for ZFS cache and 9.5 GB is being used for services, leaving only 0.8 GB listed as being free. My motherboard does not support any more than 32 GB of RAM, so I started thinking about how to free up more RAM. Is this what the L2ARC drive is for? In trying to research L2ARC, I saw it said that as a "rule of thumb", L2ARC should not be used on a system with less than 32 GB of RAM. As the motherboard only supports 32GB of RAM, I'm in a quandary as to what exactly to do. Do I need to buy a new motherboard to one that can support more RAM? If I do that, can I do so without affecting all my volumes?
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Do I need a L2ARC cache drive?
- Thread starter RonRN18
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Jailer
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The members on this forum who are much more knowledgeable than me pretty much all say that you shouldn't even consider using L2ARC until you have at least 64GB of memory. Don't worry about not having much free memory, that's by design. ZFS will use as much memory as you can give it for caching purposes. As long as you aren't using swap then you don't have anything to worry about.
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