hardware question

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Reacher

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i have about 5x8TB and 5x3TB of storage un raided and 32 gigs of ram. do i have enough ram for this if i chose raid z1.thanks
 

nojohnny101

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The rough rule of thumb around here is you should have 1GB of RAM for every 1TB of storage. This can be flexible depending upon the demands you are putting on your system.

You can use this calculator to see how much raw space and usable space you would have:
https://jsfiddle.net/Biduleohm/paq5u7z5/1/embedded/result/

Your biggest problem though is using those drives in a RAIDZ1 configuration. Google or search on here "raidz1 is dead" to understand why. Highly discouraged.
 

Jailer

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Your workload is going to be more of a determining factor on whether or not 32GB is enough. I do agree with @nojohnny101 that RAIDZ1 is strongly discouraged with that large of drives/pool.
 

Reacher

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Thanks for the quick reply and my primary goal is to have a all in one media server.so should I look at raid Z2 for my set-up.i am currently using Rockstor with a raid 10.everything on the net is saying I should be using zfs is this correct for media server.thanks
 

danb35

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everything on the net is saying I should be using zfs is this correct for media server.
ZFS has many advantages over most other filesystems, and specifically over btrfs, which is what's used by Rockstor. It's a topic which has generated a bit of discussion recently. However, ZFS has some drawbacks, and one of them is that you must plan your storage a bit more carefully, as you can't do things like changing among RAID levels or easily changing the size of RAID sets. If you want to continue using RAID 10/striped mirrors, you can expand that quite easily over time by adding pairs of disks, but you won't be able to do things like turning a three-disk RAIDZ1 pool into a four-disk RAIDZ1 pool.

Your RAM requirements really aren't going to vary depending on what pool configuration you choose (i.e., striped mirrors vs. RAIDZ1 vs. RAIDZ2), but more with your workload. But for your stated use case, 32 GB should be plenty to cover your storage and run Plex.
 

Reacher

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thanks for the reply . i know very little about FreeNAS. Is there a good guide to explain the data set and jails not sure if i understand them yet. thanks for the help
 
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danb35

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