I want to build a truenas server with the cheapest CPU I can find that can support ECC RAM: Celeron G4900T + 64gb ECC RAM + 4x18 TB SAS drives.
I don’t have experience with ZFS or with truenas (core or scale), how much important is the CPU?
Use case: hundreds of thousands of small files mostly under 1 mb, but just 2-3 concurrent users
You don’t mention your performance requirements and I’m unfamiliar with that CPU. Are you trying to saturate your 1G presumably NIC? Reads or writes?
No, just thousands of small files. Windows takes around a minute to enumerate all the files in the main share via SMB
@Moonrise2473
That looks more like ARC problem, it can hold a large index of the filesystem if you give it enough room in ram, avoiding the need to seek thousands of files on a spinning disk, which takes time. HDDs are fine for sequential operations, Random IO, which is your usecase, is their biggest weakness.
@eleitl
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ZFS tends to be more RAM intensive so make certain you have, at bare minimum around 16GB. But I would push for more.
@housepanther
As Lawrence said: “It’s not ram intensive, it’s ram efficient.”
It doesn’t let ram sit there unused. So you only really need 1G of ram per 1T of storage in general, outside some very rare cases. But the more ram you throw at it, the more snappy it becomes, but there are some diminishing returns. For example, 128G of ram on a 20T array won’t be fully utilized most of the time.
L2Arc raises ram requirements, because you also need to store it’s index there.
@Moonrise2473
In my (admittedly) limited experience with ZFS, it utilizes more RAM than CPU except for scrubs.
