You mentioned in the post that you "received a stack of 4 Pi marketing brochures and articles". Do you plan to scan these and place them on your website or the Internet Archive? I'd love to read them!
ZFS doesn't really need huge amounts of RAM. Most of the memory usage people see is the Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC), which will happily use as much memory as you throw at it, but will also shrink very quickly under memory pressure. ZFS really works fine with very little RAM (even less than the recommended 2GB), just with a smaller cache and thus lower performance. The only exception is if you enable deduplication, which will try to keep the entire Deduplication Table (DDT) in memory. But for most workloads, it doesn't make sense to enable that feature anyways.
That + full-disk encryption is why I went with BTRFS inside LUKS for my NAS.
They recommend 1GB RAM per 1TB storage for ZFS. Maybe they mean redundant storage, so even 2x16TB should use 16GB RAM? But it's painful enough building a NAS server when HDD prices have gone up so much lately.
The total price tag already feels like you're about to build another gaming PC rather than just a place to back up your machines and serve some videos. -_-
That said, you sure need to be educated on BTRFS to use it in fail scenarios like degraded mode. If ZFS has a better UX around that, maybe it's a better choice for most people.
1GB RAM per 1TB storage is really only required if you enable deduplication, which rarely makes sense.
Otherwise, the only benefit more RAM gets you is better performance. But it's not like ZFS performs terribly with little RAM. It's just going to more closely reflect raw disk speed, similar to other filesystems that don't do much caching.
I've run ZFS on almost all my machines for years, some with only 512MiB of RAM. It's always been rock-solid. Is more RAM better? Sure. But it's absolutely not required. Don't choose a different file system just because you think it'll perform better with little RAM. It probably won't, except under very extreme circumstances.
That explains the cheap DDR4 DIMMs on AliExpress. Can get 2x 16GB DDR4-3200 DIMMs for A$252 delivered to Australia. A local PC store has same spec “name brand” RAM for around $380-$400.
Oh don’t worry I know. If I can pat myself on the back a bit, I was super vindicated at work last week when someone shared a WD drive shortage article - I had pushed us to grab 7x 14TB refurbished enterprise drives in December (6 bay raid, 7th is a spare). The 12TB seagate EXOS currently cost $110 more than we paid for those 14’s.
My experience is that bosses read my blog, then when they or a fellow manager need to hire someone, have reached out to me asking me to apply. So it cuts both ways - maybe your shitty boss sees you blogging and sharing your experience, but a good boss will see that and go "I want this passionate and curious person to work for me".
There was some anecdotal stuff floating around some years ago that smaller studios stopped doing custom Linux builds because Proton+Windows ran faster than their native build =)
I have a 2024 Volvo EX30, driven it about 11,000km. It uses the same computer system platform as the EX90 and while it's not fantastic (my previous Tesla is superior), it's better than most EVs I've driven and hasn't given me any problems. I love the car, so it's a shame the more expensive and "luxury" EX90 is plagued by these issues.
That said, Volvo Canada really needs to lift its game and just give the guy a new car already. Hope the bad PR and lawsuit gets Volvo to realise their mistake, apologise and refund him.
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