Your NAS needs more RAM than you think
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When building a NAS, RAM is often overlooked but critically important — especially when running ZFS-based distros like TrueNAS. ZFS uses an Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC) that aggressively allocates RAM to speed up read operations, making 4GB a bottleneck for larger storage pools. Self-hosted apps and virtual machines add further memory pressure. Deduplication is flagged as largely unnecessary for most home labs and extremely RAM-hungry, requiring roughly 1–2GB per 1TB of storage, with performance degrading severely if RAM runs out during dedup workloads.
Table of contents
ZFS is a massive RAM hogSelf-hosted apps can require extra memory, tooBut you don't need to go broke trying to buy 100GB+ RAM sticks for deduplication180 Impressions