Does more ram make a difference?

[Starshock2002]

Hello. Forgive my ignorance. I'm looking to set up using a mini pc that I have laying around and i have a few options for which ram kit to use. It's currently got 16gb (2×8), but I have a 32gb(2x16) and an 8gb(2x4) kit in other systems that I could swap out for.

My question is, does it make a huge difference? Would I be better off using the less or more than 16gb?

[arvinpw]

the minimum requirement for HexOS is 8GB of RAM, so you can use 2x4GB of RAM with no problem.
but if you plan to use some extra application on this server, having more RAM won't hurt

[cake]

I don't have any experience with ZFS personally, but my understanding based on reading is that ZFS wants to aggressively cache as many files in memory as possible. It also keeps checksums for files in memory. The TrueNAS community recommends 1 GB of ECC memory per 1 TB of data stored.

[Mobius]

I agree with cake 

[Dylan]

ZFS is a VERY RAM hungry filesystem. In fact, I have relatively small requirements for my NAS - streaming, photos etc - and even went with a low power CPU, the Intel N100. However, I DID upgrade to 32GB of RAM just to ensure that my little system has every opportunity to do its job well.

Short answer, go with as much RAM as you can,