Rescued the drives from the trash, all functional, less than 1 year old. I am looking to set up a multimedia server and NAS, but I need hardware suggestions. Looking to keep the spend here under $600. The synology drive bays are giving me some sticker shock. Was planning on using TrueNas.
8gb is bare minimum for ZFS. 32gb would be great. ZFS will use all of it.
I would use a minimum of 3 drives because then it is easy to expand later (opposed to starting with 1 or 2).
You could start with the 16tb drives if you want. Personally I like to save power and every spinning drive takes 5-15 watts of power.
Somewhat of a misnomer. Yes, ZFS likes RAM, and yes it’ll use a lot if you let it. So the moar the better, obviously. But to suggest anything under 8GB is unworkable is a bit in the dramatic side. You may not get optimal performance in all cases but the system will function well enough to saturate a Gbps LAN and honestly if your budget is $600 with some found rust I doubt OP’s requirements are to stream several full bitrate 4K videos simultaneously.