Hi everyone, I just stuck in an old motherboard which happens to have 16gb of ddr3 ram, its old, but still quite useful to use as a NAS. (if anyone from the last thread visits, its because the old motherboard's network hardware failed, and without PCIe ports, wasn't worth trying to salvage)

 

Here's the deal... 16gb seems to be far more than unraid needs. However I don't really run any docker containers or anything like that (okay, I run one, but just to sync some critical data to backblaze), just storage, and wondering if I can make use of a lot of that ram (about 14-15gb remaining) to do something with the nas. Speed it up? Reduce some load on the hard drives? Anything to better utilize the hardware and either give me speed or longevity. Basically any advice would be appreciated.

 

Thank you all in advance.

If you plan to use zfs, it would be handy to configure some RAM as cache

 

You can use cache dirs plugin to speed up dir listings (and avoid unnecessary disk access), though I doubt it needs a lot of ram

 

If you work with any transient data, you can create a ram disk, though this use case is more useful with apps then a basic NAS use case

 

Linux anyway uses extra ram for IO buffers and caching, so if you happen to load same data repeatedly, spare RAM will help even when you don't see it being used explicitly

 

In the end, don't sweat it too much. Spare RAM is good for a server, definitely better than running with very small headroom. 16GB is not too large to worry about

Hey! Thanks for the reply, I didn't see my notifications! Cache dirs sniffs ram at best But guess my worklow is just low that it doesn't matter. In any case, thank you!