Recycling HP microserver N40L + SSD - just enough or not so close?

[JPE]

Hello,

I'm recycling a HP N40L with 4x 3TB drives, 8GB of RAM and a spare SSD (64GB).
I plan to use it for home storage server. I don't plan to use dedup, but I kinda would like to have the benefits of ZFS (self-healing FS/resiliency//compression). I've read that 8GB is the bare minimum for FreeNAS + ZFS, will this configuration allow me to run other components (like plex media server/transmission) and cifs (I don't expect a high BW through cifs) or is this too short ?

Should I go to something else?

Thank you in advance.

 

[cyberjock]

No, Plex is a memory hog. You're going to need more RAM. You can put 16GB on the N40L as many users here have done it. But, you're going to find transcoding of movies with Plex to be a disappointment with the N40L. It's not a powerhouse and it shows. ;)

The SSD is not particularly useful and you shouldn't use it in your server.

 

[JPE]

Thanks for your quick answer!

 

[Middling]

I have a similar config (N40L microserver with 8GiB ECC and 5x 2TB drives in RAIDZ).

I use it to serve media over SMB to 4 computers running XBMC, a WII using WiiMC and a Hackintosh using MplayerX. These can all be accessing media at the same time with no problems.

In addition i have CUPS in a jail, and another jail running my personal static website (also sharing my media over an authenticated SSL connection to 2 more XBMC machines via the Internet).

It's a great little box for the simple stuff but i agree with cyberjock that asking it to transcode with Plex is going a bit too far.