Should I have bought more RAM instead of two SSDs?

OpenZFS TrueNAS
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I have a UGREEN DXP4800 Plus on the way, with 4× 16TB IronWolf Pro drives and 2× 2TB NVMe SSDs, because I thought the fast storage would be useful. The more I read here and elsewhere, the more I think that maybe I don’t need that much SSD for my use case, but I might want more than the standard 8GB RAM.

Even though I’m a long time FreeBSD user my plan is to run TrueNAS Scale because I’d rather have an appliance than a hobby, and Scale makes it easier to install the other services I plan to host on the box. I’ve learned here that a mirrored vdevs make more sense than RAIDZ2 (if they’re both 50% storage efficiency, use the higher performance one) but I’m not sure what to do about the SSD boot/swap/special situation.

Services: Emby (definitely), Navidrome (probably), and NextCloud (or something like it). Also I’ll be setting up a Time Machine compatible SMB share because we’re a Mac household.

I’m having trouble figuring out what memory pressure is really going to be with those services, and I already spent more money than I really wanted to because I only want to go through this setup once. Should I return one SSD and buy more RAM instead, or go ahead and install both and just assume/hope that memory pressure won’t be too bad? How bad will it be if I have to wait, say, six months before upgrading the RAM? And if I install both SSDs, what’s the optimal setup?

Thanks!

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Return one and get more RAM.

Scale is quite memory hungry; if you want it hosting applications beyond simple file sharing stuff you’re almost certainly going to feel the pinch with only 8GiB RAM quickly.

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Thanks! Funny story, it turns out that 32GB sticks are basically unavailable right now except from eBay resellers or at a huge markup, so I went with a 2×16 kit. It was $75 shipped so I may just keep the extra SSD anyway.

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If you keep them both, I’d recommend using them as a separate mirror pool, which you can put your absolute most performance demanding stuff on (eg if any of those apps you want to host have db functions, the DB goes on the SSD pool).