[eriknstr]

The massive amounts of RAM recommendation is if you need to do deduplication. Are you doing that? If not then you don't need a lot of RAM.

Between the low cost of storage, and alternative solutions for deduplicating data I personally don't use the built-in deduplication functionality of ZFS for my zpools. Might come down to what sorts of data you are storing, though.

[sfoskett]

Yup. This. Now that I have 32 GB of RAM in my FreeNAS box I decided I really didn't need dedupe after all. I just don't have that much duplicated data, and I've got 60 TB of HDDs in the box. So I use the RAM for VMs instead!

[agumonkey]

Yeah dedup is mostly useful for massively multiusers setups, say mail, file sharing, etc etc. For small setups you can do a `fdupes` pass once a day and fix it yourself I suppose.