I am looking at building my next NAS. My current will move to offsite, and the new will be primary. I previously used this motherboard, and was planning to go with that again. Then I saw this one, which seems like a better option. It has a slightly better CPU and a PCIe slot, but can only have 32GB memory max compared with 64GB max on my current.
Am I missing anything or is this a no-brainer to switch to the N100 board?
ZFS. It can use up as much RAM as you care to give it for caching. So if you are slinging a lot of data back and forth, more RAM is better. Especially if you are using HDDs instead of SSDs.
It’s a function of ZFS itself. Data that is to be written to the drives is first written to RAM, then transferred to the drives. One of the benefits of this is that if you are moving a file that is smaller than the available RAM, your transfer won’t appear to be limited to the write speed of the drives.
And bumping up the RAM for caching makes a HUGE difference in performance on a RAM starved system. Going from 16 to 32 gigs almost doubled my read write performance for anything other than tiny files here and there. And overall I/O latency tanked.
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Why do you need so much ram in your NAS?
ZFS. It can use up as much RAM as you care to give it for caching. So if you are slinging a lot of data back and forth, more RAM is better. Especially if you are using HDDs instead of SSDs.
Why do you need to cache data? To seed a lot of torrents?
It’s a function of ZFS itself. Data that is to be written to the drives is first written to RAM, then transferred to the drives. One of the benefits of this is that if you are moving a file that is smaller than the available RAM, your transfer won’t appear to be limited to the write speed of the drives.
And bumping up the RAM for caching makes a HUGE difference in performance on a RAM starved system. Going from 16 to 32 gigs almost doubled my read write performance for anything other than tiny files here and there. And overall I/O latency tanked.