I want Hardwaresuggestion and Best Practices for OpenZFS Setup

OpenZFS
1

Hey everyone,

I have got a pretty basic setup at home right now & I am planning to expand it. I am thinking about setting up a NAS with OpenZFS and wanted to know what hardware you all suggestion for a beginner. I am curious about what kind of CPU and RAM I should be looking at. Also are there any must have features or configurations I should consider from the get go to avoid headaches later?

I have a solid plan in place before I get too far along. Are there specific tools or scripts that you have found invaluable?

Also i have check this article and resorse; https://discourse.practicalzfs.com/t/best-practices-for-setting-up-openzfs-on-ubuntutensorflow Any resources, tutorials or personal experiences you can share would be greatly appreciated. I have been reading up on it but there is nothing like real world advice from people who have been through it.

Thank you

2

Essentially any desktop CPU from the last decade is fine. So is motherboard SATA.

I’d recommend 16GiB RAM–not because “you need that much to run ZFS”, you don’t, but more RAM does mean much better cache hit rates.

I would strongly recommend, especially as a beginner, leaving the ARC max at half the physical RAM. That means you have 8GiB left over for the host OS and any apps, after filesystem cache. That’s a pretty easy, comfortable, stuff just works without pain kind of environment for general purpose faffing about.