Earlier quoted context omitted.
ZFS uses a large amount of ram, i think the old rule of thumb was 1GB ram per 1TB of storage
Huh. More than just the normal page cache on other filesystems?
DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
11–20 of 315 posts
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#12Very sad that HDDs, SSDs, and RAM are all increasing in price now, but I just made a 4 x 24 TB ZFS pool with Seagate Barracudas on sale at $10 / TB [1]. This seems like a pretty decent price even though the Barracudas are rated for 2400 hours per year [2] but this is the same spec that the refurbished Exos drives are rated for. By the way, interesting to see that OP has no qualms about buying cheap Chinese motherboar…
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#13Very sad that HDDs, SSDs, and RAM are all increasing in price now, but I just made a 4 x 24 TB ZFS pool with Seagate Barracudas on sale at $10 / TB [1]. This seems like a pretty decent price even though the Barracudas are rated for 2400 hours per year [2] but this is the same spec that the refurbished Exos drives are rated for. By the way, interesting to see that OP has no qualms about buying cheap Chinese motherboar…
That's a remarkably good price. If I had $1.5k handy I'd be sorely tempted (even tho it's Seagate).
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#14Very sad that HDDs, SSDs, and RAM are all increasing in price now, but I just made a 4 x 24 TB ZFS pool with Seagate Barracudas on sale at $10 / TB [1]. This seems like a pretty decent price even though the Barracudas are rated for 2400 hours per year [2] but this is the same spec that the refurbished Exos drives are rated for. By the way, interesting to see that OP has no qualms about buying cheap Chinese motherboar…
> $10 / TB That's a remarkably good price. If I had $1.5k handy I'd be sorely tempted (even tho it's Seagate).
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#15Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#16Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#17Q - assuming the NAS was strictly used as NAS and not as a server with VMs, is there a point in having a large amount of RAM? (large as in >8GB) I'm not sure what the benefit would be since all it's doing is moving information from the drives over to the network.
Caching files in ram means they can be moved to the network faster - right?
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#18Q - assuming the NAS was strictly used as NAS and not as a server with VMs, is there a point in having a large amount of RAM? (large as in >8GB) I'm not sure what the benefit would be since all it's doing is moving information from the drives over to the network.
Honestly it's not that needed but if you would really use the 10Gbit+ networking then 1 second is ~125Mbytes. So depending on your usage you can never even more than 15% utilization or have it almost all if you constantly running something on it ie torrents or using it a SAN/NAS for VM on some other machine.
But for a rare occasional home usage nor 32Gb nor this monstrosity and complexity doesn't make sense - just buy some 1-2 bay Synology and forget about it.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#19Case can actually fit a low-profile discrete GPU, there's about half height worth of space.
Re: DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
#20Q - assuming the NAS was strictly used as NAS and not as a server with VMs, is there a point in having a large amount of RAM? (large as in >8GB) I'm not sure what the benefit would be since all it's doing is moving information from the drives over to the network.
ZFS uses a large amount of ram, i think the old rule of thumb was 1GB ram per 1TB of storage