Am I going to benefit from 32GB over 16GB of memory in unRAID?

[ingeborgdot]

Is 32GB of memory going to give me much of a benefit? Also, is 3200 or higher going to give me any benefit over 2666 speed memory?  ALl of this is for an unRAID server that will mainly be running Plex.

Thanks.

[Hoopster]

2 minutes ago, ingeborgdot said:

Is 32GB of memory going to give me much of a benefit?

More memory is usually better if running VMs to which you want to dedicate a certain amount of RAM.  Also if you are running a lot of Docker containers, more RAM can be good.  If you have neither VMs nor a lot of Docker containers, 16GB could be sufficient depending on your needs.

 

If you are going to set Plex to transcode in RAM, you need to have enough RAM to do that efficiently for multiple streams if you will have multiple users accessing Plex simultaneously and the media needs to be transcoded.  There are ways to limit the amount of RAM Plex uses for transcoding.  Most say that 4GB is sufficient for transcoding but I personally have 16GB allocated to Plex transcoding simply because I have the RAM available in my 64GB server.  My backup server has only 32GB RAM.

 

You will likely not notice much difference between 2666 and 3200 RAM speeds unless you are running a VM or Docker container for which RAM speed is important.  For basic unRAID NAS functions it wont matter much.

[ingeborgdot]

Right now, I have CORSAIR Vengeance LED 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4 2666 (PC4 21300) Memory (Desktop Memory) Model CMU16GX4M2A2666C16 that I'm using in a device I am retiring. I really think I need at least 32GB because of the shared Plex that I do. But, using all 4 channels is not something that is of any benefit from what I read. Running 2 channels of memory is always best, so 2 -16 GB of memory would be what I need if it will help. Unless, you know something different about have all for slots filled.

[Kilrah]

Well, what's your typical RAM usage on the dashboard, and under high load?

Edited October 18, 2022 by Kilrah

[ingeborgdot]

Dashboard? I have not setup unRAID.  I am building the server now.

[Stalkkaaja]

I've had 32Gb of ECC on a Ryzen platform for a couple years now and it's never went past 50% of usage unless I boot more VMs. But yea, having 16Gb is more than enough even with Plex transcoding to memory as VMs are the main culprit if you run out of memory.

[Doc Holliday]

One of my dockers uses 3gb

[tucansam]

I've got 16GB and am going to try having plex x-code to /tmp

Edited October 23, 2022 by tucansam