More Memory?

[th3r3turn]

Hi

 

im currently a newbie, and still learning unraid, So far i have it running great and looking to improve it more. Currently i have a HP Compaq dc7700 Small Form Factor computer running 2x 2TB drives, (will be adding another 2TB soon i hope) I have upgraded from a P4 2.8Ghz to a E6300 @ 1.8GHz, and now looking at the memory. I have 2Gigs at the moment and was looking at getting 4gigs. Will this help me? im using it as a fileserver, and air video for my SD content. i have alot of HD (MKV 720p) content and want to play them on my AIR VIDEO. will the E6300 and 4Gigs of memory help.

 

Any help would be great please.

 

thanks!

[SSD]

2G is plenty of memory for unRaid. Unless you are running some memory hungry addons, more memory is not going to have any noticable impact on your system.

[ubuntuaddicted]

Not sure how air video works BUT the way normal streaming works to the best of my knowledge is the CPU and Memory would need to be beefy on the device that is processing it. Meaning unless I am misunderstanding your setup and the way AIR VIDEO upgrading your unRAID servers memory won't help at all as the media isn't being playing on the unRAID, it's being streamed and plate back on another device.

 

I am new to unRAID and not sure about air video but like I said, that's my understanding of how streaming media on your internal network works.

 

Example: I run a mythtv backend server. Playback is done by a very capable "frontend client" in the family room which has a quad core CPU and 4gb of ram because I am able to play back raw ripped Blueray discs.

 

Good luck

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[WeeboTech]

2G is plenty of memory for unRaid. Unless you are running some memory hungry addons, more memory is not going to have any noticable impact on your system.

 

What he said.

The only time it helps is when you have heavy read and write activity, such as torrenting and you re-tune the buffers.

For basic read streaming, extra memory does not help much unless you want to cache the whole file in ram allowing the hard drive to spin down.

[th3r3turn]

thanks people, but air video is more of a transcoder, it will steam video to my ipad, but cause they are not native apple format, mp4 it transcode them into mp4 on the fly and steams to ipad. Now my understanding is i would need more memory to help handle this, more for my 720p MKV files.

[dgaschk]

A dual core CPU is needed for air video; and at least 2GB RAM. If your also running torrents or net news downloads or expect to serve more than one video stream then get 4GB.

[th3r3turn]

thanks, i guess i dont need anything more then. no torrent just air video and file sharing. have been looking apple TV 2 and xbox accessing it.

[opentoe]

Adding more memory, no matter what is running will improve performance. I don't know ANY situation where it has not. I suggest adding as much as you can. I 'had' 2GB of RAM in my original unraid server. Upgraded to 4GB and enjoyed the performance increase happily.

[WeeboTech]

It all depends on how heavily you use your system.

 

In my case, it's my main fileserver for everything on my network. I have 8GB of ram.

 

It serves torrents, music, video, my home folders and an NFS automount share for hundreds of thousands of source files.

Do I notice it, only when I really start to use the system very heavily.

 

The extra memory helps cache directories and files so that when you traverse them again, allot of it is in ram.

 

If I were only serving media every now and then, 2GB would be enough.

[Johnm]

if you're talking modern DDR3, right now it is priced at an all time low.

it would be silly not to  stock up on  ram..  you can get 16Gig for about what i bought 4 gigs for a year ago.

for an older server, i would have to weigh the pros and cons.

[th3r3turn]

Thanks everyone, this is jsut my first build, using old parts, but next one will be more better! memory is cheapest atm, ive seen 16GIGs for 150NZD which is amazing!

[WeeboTech]

If memory is at an all time low, then fill your motherboard up with what you can afford.

I almost always tell people that.

 

However, the way unRAID works, the return on investment is small unless you use the machine heavily.

It's lean and works from 512MB up to whatever your pocket can afford.

 

With the idea of transcoding in mind, I might consider investment into a good CPU with good cooling.

With my understanding, memory will buffer only so much. The CPU is going to have to do the work of recoding the files on the fly.

 

So go to 4GB if you can get it at a good price, test everything out and see how your current cpu performs. That's where you may need to upgrade.

 

For example

 

I have a special mobile processor motherboard. Speedster AR4 with a T7600 mobile processor. Equal to a core 2 duo 2.4Ghz.

 

I use it for my livign room htpc running XBMC. For most of what I do which is basic media playing and fileserving (I added samba to the XBMC install). it works good.

 

But I put in mp3fs to transcode from flac to mp3 on the fly... and I gotta say, when I copy a directory to an mp3 player, I sure do wish I had more CPU. The transcoding goes at about 600KB/s. Fast enough to stream. Slow enough to make me wait when I want to fill up an MP3 player.

 

I plan to upgrade my unRAID server with a 3 ghz 8400 and put mp3fs on that now to help out with the chores.

 

Anyway, just some food for thought.