--- title: "Your NAS needs more RAM than you think" url: https://daily.dev/posts/your-nas-needs-more-ram-than-you-think-pvwztstbr source_url: https://www.xda-developers.com/your-nas-needs-more-ram-than-you-think type: article source: "XDA Developers" published: 2026-06-21T12:00:31.744Z updated: 2026-07-02T02:12:53.646Z tags: ["homelab", "linux", "self-hosting", "truenas"] reading_time: 3 upvotes: 0 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Your NAS needs more RAM than you think **[XDA Developers](https://daily.dev/sources/xda-developers)** · 3 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary 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. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Your NAS doesn't need to be all-SSD, and TrueNAS proved it to me](https://daily.dev/posts/your-nas-doesn-t-need-to-be-all-ssd-and-truenas-proved-it-to-me-h9oql4yqq) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Two drives and TrueNAS taught me that storage doesn't need to be big to be serious](https://daily.dev/posts/two-drives-and-truenas-taught-me-that-storage-doesn-t-need-to-be-big-to-be-serious-art9fhlvz) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [My NAS does more than store files, and most people are barely using theirs](https://daily.dev/posts/my-nas-does-more-than-store-files-and-most-people-are-barely-using-theirs-imkyv4w2l) · XDA Developers · 2 upvotes · 0 comments - [I tested TrueNAS, Unraid, and ZimaOS back-to-back, and they're built for completely different people](https://daily.dev/posts/i-tested-truenas-unraid-and-zimaos-back-to-back-and-they-re-built-for-completely-different-people-fcv3w9qrt) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [My NAS' ZFS pools taught me snapshots matter far more than the RAID level I obsessed over](https://daily.dev/posts/my-nas-zfs-pools-taught-me-snapshots-matter-far-more-than-the-raid-level-i-obsessed-over-m95vqikrl) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#homelab](https://daily.dev/tags/homelab), [#linux](https://daily.dev/tags/linux), [#self-hosting](https://daily.dev/tags/self-hosting), [#truenas](https://daily.dev/tags/truenas) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/your-nas-needs-more-ram-than-you-think-pvwztstbr)