Why do Freenas 8 have excessive hardware requirements ?

[nicolas1400]

Hello everyone, My question is:
Why Freenas8 needs way too more RAM than NAS4FREE to do the same ?
Why Freenas8 recommends 6gb+ to handle zfs filesystem while I can do pretty much the same thing with nas4free using legacy hardware?
This is not a post agains freenas8. Don't get me wrong. I just want a justification and I'll probably install freenas8. But till now I read lot of documentation and both OS's have basically the same features except from freenas8 excessive hardware requirements.

 

[warri]

FreeNAS recommends 1 GB RAM per TB ZFS data storage. But you can even run a stable system with 2-4 GB of RAM, like many forum members do - it might just not be as fast. On the Nas4Free Documentation I see "For using ZFS, we recommend a absolute minimum of 1 GB RAM and using a 64-bits install by using the NAS4Free-x64 releases."
Apart from a more vague specification, where do you see significant differences?

 

[jgreco]

Because FreeNAS 8 is a ground-up rewrite, and this is 2012 where 8GB of RAM can be as little as $30, not 2005 where 8GB of RAM was $1800. That means that it is no longer onerous to pick up large amounts of RAM. More RAM means that one can focus less on keeping the code as small as possible and can focus instead on stuffing more features in. More RAM means that when the thing is running, it can make better use of the rest of the system. Since FreeNAS 8 is essentially a free variant of TrueNAS, and TrueNAS is probably aimed at the enterprise, and a few dollars cost difference means nothing if the performance gains are substantial, ...

I mean, consider this Qnap 1U NAS. $1600, diskless. So with FreeNAS I can do

$600 - ASUS RS300-E7/PS4 1U Server
$320 - 32GB RAM
$230 - Xeon E3-1230
-----
$1150

Anyways, look, for $1600 a vendor will sell me a 1U NAS unit with an Atom CPU, two gigE ports, and 1GB of RAM and have the temerity to call it "high performance."

For $1150, any random user can build a 1U NAS with an efficient Xeon CPU, four gigE ports, and 32GB of RAM. Oh, add a few bucks for a USB thumb drive, forgot that.

Look, when it comes right down to it, not every free software project is designed to minimize your costs. If you want a FreeNAS that works on 1GB, you can do it, but it's a little work - the project isn't targeting that by default. There's NAS4Free for that.

We live in an amazing age. My Sun 3/60LE was able to take a whopping 12MB of RAM and boy was it blazing fast when I made the jump from 4MB to 12MB! It made running X11 with several dialup users logged in quite tolerable... but of course the big beefy Sun 3/260 fileserver with its 32MB of RAM was like so awesome. Throwing lots of resources at serving files has always made it zippier.

 

[webberen]

Hello everyone, My question is:
Why Freenas8 needs way too more RAM than NAS4FREE to do the same ?
Why Freenas8 recommends 6gb+ to handle zfs filesystem while I can do pretty much the same thing with nas4free using legacy hardware?
This is not a post agains freenas8. Don't get me wrong. I just want a justification and I'll probably install freenas8. But till now I read lot of documentation and both OS's have basically the same features except from freenas8 excessive hardware requirements.

Well put !!!! :)