RAM for Freenas Box

[anup modak]

I currently have 64GB RAM in my freenas server.
It has two volumes. First volume is 6x4TB Raid-z2.
The second volume has two vdev's in raid-Z2 vdev 1: 6x4Tb vdev2:6x6TB.
I am looking at adding another 64GB RAM. Will I get any performance gain?

 

[DifferentStrokes]

What all are you doing with the box? Is it straight file shares or are you also running jails/VMs? Plex? Transcoding?

 

[anup modak]

Only file storage...
But will be doing NFS shares for VM's...

 

[jgreco]

It is hard to make absolute statements based on such sketchy information. If the box is very busy, then, yes, RAM almost always helps, as long as some of the data being read is cacheable. If the box isn't very busy, and the data being read isn't likely to be in cache, then RAM isn't likely to be a noticeable boost.

 

[anup modak]

Thnks Jgreco. I am really new at this.Luckily I followed the hardware guide in this forum...

 

[rogerh]

Thnks Jgreco. I am really new at this.Luckily I followed the hardware guide in this forum...

But not necessarily all the guidance in the forum rules about what info to provide before asking a question! Although in my case I only mention it because of curiosity about your system hardware and software. And I suppose it might help in refining the answers from those in a position to advise.

 

[maglin]

So you have 56TB of available space? I think I got that correct. Based on the 1GB ram to 1TB wag I would say you are good for a while more. I've been doing some reading and with that many disks and pools getting a SLOG might be advantageous. Starting to host VM's might not work out as well as you like unless you put them on either a Stripped Mirror array or get some SSD's for them. This is just from reading.

Maybe someone else can say if a SLOG will give you a performance boost but after reading up on it systems with a lot of disks can benefit performance wise as your use of IOPS grows.

 

[joeschmuck]

Based on the 1GB ram to 1TB wag I would say you are good for a while more.

This 1GB RAM to 1TB storage is good up to a certain point and also depends on what you are doing with your NAS. Simple file storage needs not so much RAM whereas deduplication needs a huge amount of RAM, or if you can take advantage of a huge cache. Most systems seem to work fine with 32GB RAM no matter how large the storage is, but most is not all systems so they have to be tailored to the specific use of the NAS. The OP will need to re-evaluate to see if running the VMs NFS shares will require some hardware changes. If you need high speed, sometimes you need to rearrange the way the storage pools are configured.

Sorry, running my mouth here... Later.