Does RAM speed matters?

[Brindar AxlMeson]

Hey,

I'm building a NAS almost from ground up. But I try to keep it cheap, but with room to upgrade.
I got a µATA board, ASRock H61M-VG3
just basic motherboard with 4 Sata ports and on sale for €38

But then the cpu gave me a trouble.
There is the intel celeron G1620 an Ivy bridge 2700mhz for €45, but this one only supports ram until 1333mhz.
And then there is the Intel core i3-3240 also Ivy bridge but 3400mhz. It does support ram up to 1600mhz, but it costs a wopping €110
So does this make the all time difference? Because it doubles my cost on the cpu.
Without the cpu I got a total cost of €250 (includes two 2TB seagates)

Things I'm interested in updating later on
Ram, from 4 to 8gig
Lan ports, from 1 to 3
and hard drives ofcourse (But I did two years with one terra, so it can wait)

Also, do the developers read this to? Or is this just a user to user help forum?
If so, how do I get this question to them?

 

[DrKK]

Your proposed rig isn't even remotely up to the recommended/required specifications for safely running FreeNAS with ZFS, sir.

I suggest you read some of the stickies, and documentation.

 

[Knowltey]

It doesn't matter anywhere near as much as having ECC RAM, which is something that you aren't using and is required if you want any semblance of stability

 

[DJ9]

I wouldn't bother, since the motherboard does not support ECC memory, and the Realtek RTL8111E nic.
Specs here: http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/H61M-VG3/?cat=Specifications

Most people around here recommend a SuperMicro motherboard with ECC memory, and it's good advise to follow.
8GB of ram is the minimum recommended amount for FreeNAS.

 

[DrKK]

I helped a guy in the IRC today...

Guess what his rig was? 768MB of non-ECC RAM, 4x2TB hard drives, and a Pentium chip from the other George Bush's presidency.

Probably should have smashed his computer with a hammer instead of helping him.

 

[cyberjock]

I helped a guy in the IRC today...

Guess what his rig was? 768MB of non-ECC RAM, 4x2TB hard drives, and a Pentium chip from the other George Bush's presidency.

Probably should have smashed his computer with a hammer instead of helping him.

Moron of the day award goes to THAT person!!!!

 

[Brindar AxlMeson]

I don't want to use ZFS, I don't need such a high end machine.
Just something to store my data at home. Even redundancy isn't needed for me.
Just want it read and write quickly in RAID 0

Mayby I will go for the ZFS after a couple of years.
SO I guess the read/write of a RAID 0 system isn't much affected by the speed of the RAM?

 

[cyberjock]

As Knowley said, no. RAM speed isn't important.

 

[HolyK]

No, not at all ... the difference between 1333MHz and 1600MHz is somewhere between 1% and 2% but this is just an "benchmark" thing. In reality there is no visible improvement/difference. So my suggestion is to go for lower speed with lower voltage (1,5V instead of 1,65V)

Or another approach is to get 1600@1.65 and underclock them to 1333@1,5V ... but i don't see any reason to do that since 1600Mhz ECC modules are bit expensive than 1333Mhz

 

[Brindar AxlMeson]

thank you HolyK
your answer was really helpfull

Now I can look up some motherboards that do support ECC and see if the prices aren't to steep

 

[Brindar AxlMeson]

Hey,

I have a system up and running, now all that remains is the tweaking of the settings.
I do have a lot of questions about the configuration, but that will be al lot of looking up. it's going to be a steep learning curve.

I first started testing the software on a Pentium4 D 3.02ghz with 2gig of DDR (yes DDR1) RAM, 2 drives one 500GB and one of 80GB.
It was slow, but stable.

In the end, this is what I used.
MSI B75MA-P45
Corsair 4Gb DDR3 1333Mhz Xmp ram
Intel Celeron G1620 (2,7 dual core)
300Watt Atx power system from be quiet
two WD red 2TB
And a tiny usb stick of 8 gig

I must say, it runs smoothly.
Yes it is not up to the specifications for a ZFS-file system. Yes it doens't have any ECC-ram. (And I checked, the motherboard was four times more expensive)
But I don't needed it all.
And if you know that first I wanted to buy this guy.
http://www.alternate.be/Asustor/Asustor+AS-602T/html/product/1082381/
And that my current system costed €30 more with two 2TB drives
I say, this is good for me.

Anyhow thanks for all the help

 

[joeschmuck]

As long as you're aware, when you loose your data that we will beat on you for not having the right RAM nor enough of it. You could just be running Windoze XP and sharing the hard drives, or any other free OS for that matter.