Hello,

 

as a newbie/noob I'd like some questions answered

 

1. Is there any benefit in using a bigger usb3 (8GB+) stick rather than one that fits the minimum specs

2. Any benefits on running 24 or 32 GB of Ram - I guess the faster the better ...

3. Anyone has any experience with the seagate hybrid disks - any benefits with them

4. Cache disks - the bigger the better or the faster the better

5. I7 or Xeon

6. Any UPC recommendation - should be 4x USB for the servers shutdown and should have ip controllable (on/off) ac outlets

 

aso. asf.

 

cheers ahab666

 

1. Is there any benefit in using a bigger usb3 (8GB+) stick rather than one that fits the minimum specs

Not really.  The Powerdown plugin will save off your syslog on powerdown so your USB content will slowly grow - so a larger stick helps there.  Frankly, the main reason to get an 8GB+ stick these days is that it's getting harder to find anything smaller!  I'd use an 8 or 16GB San Disk Cruzer Fit.

 

2. Any benefits on running 24 or 32 GB of Ram - I guess the faster the better ...

Depends on what you are doing with your server.  The main benefit of more RAM than you "need" is that unRAID will do in memory write caching with the remainder.  How much you need depends on Dockers, VMs, etc.  unRAID will run on 2GB of RAM, but I would recommend at least 4GB as a starting point.  Want to run some Dockers?  Get 8GB.  Want to run a VM or two?  Get 16GB.  Want to run several VMs?  Get 24GB+.

 

4. Cache disks - the bigger the better or the faster the better

Again, depends on what you do with it.  The most common use of the cache drive these days is as an application drive for Dockers and VMs.  In that case a moderate size SSD is best - say, 250GB.  Caching writes to the array is still done, but not as often as it once was.  In that case you need a cache drive that is big enough to store all the writes to the array between Mover runs (typically 24 hours).

 

5. I7 or Xeon

The real question is ECC RAM or regular RAM.  The major difference between E3 Xeons and their similarly cored/clocked i7's is the fact that Xeon supports ECC RAM.  I think ECC RAM is a great idea for a fault tolerant always-on server but it isn't the critical necessity it is for FreeNAS.