On 8/2/2020 11:07 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
I absolutely agree, no matter what the file system, I would definitely up the memory to the 16GB max, especially if this is to be a media server.Unless you're serving some quite demanding clients, I'd expect 16GB in an NAS to be a complete waste of money.
There is the rub! A flat file server needs a solid IO system, but not much computing horsepower. In this respect, media files are no different than any other files. The twist comes in if the server is offering up video files in formats that are not native to the clients and must recode the files on the fly. My main server has an Asus Sabertooth 990FX motherboard with an 8 core AMD FX-8350 processor and 16G of memory. When doing simple file operations, especially primarily reads, the CPU frequency usually hovers around 2.4GHz with at most two or three cores running at moderate load and plenty of free memory.
When a request comes along to recode an HD MPEG-II file to h.264 or vice-versa, the CPU clock jumps to over 4.0 GHz with all 8 cores slamming away at over 80% utilization and the memory usage pegs.
IOW it all depends about what kind of NAS you're designing, and with what kind of connectivity and software.
Absolutely.