[jimlei]

I used FreeNAS with ZFS before but was put off by their HW recommendations at around 1GB ECC ram for each TB storage space. They do say home users can soften this up, whatever that means.

Are they totally wrong, do they have some kind of special implementation that requires lots of ram not to fail, or are you just not worried about it?

ref: http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Hardware_Recommendations

[erkkie]

It's not freenas specific but ZFS in general likes plenty of ram (and ECC is a must). It's questionable whether the GB for TB holds once you have "enough" in the 8+ GB range of ram

[jspiros]

I only have 32GB of RAM for ~73TiB under ZFS management, so I have huge SSD cache devices in my pool. The cache devices really lower ZFS' need for RAM, and it works well for me. Before the cache devices, 32GB felt very tight.

So, yes, you definitely need a lot of RAM. Consider cache devices if you can't do the GB/TB ratio.

[softkitty]

Yes they are wrong. This is a very soft recommendation. This recommendation comes from community users experience.