Advantages to adding memory?

[joek1973]

Hi all,

Just bought a F2-423 (being delivered tomorrow) and am looking to make it as responsive (quick to use) as I can within a reasonable budget. I can see that 32GB is the theoretical limit but I expect I don't need that much. It will probably be just a plain old NAS for family storage with perhaps some media running family videos to the smart TV etc. Any idea what a reasonable number is for that use case? I think the factory amount is 4GB.

Cheers

Joe

[rusanovd]

Hello,

4GB should be fine. My F2-221 came with 2GB and performed adequately out of the box (maxed out the 1Gbps connection with a single large file), albeit only with just one concurrent user. In my opinion adding more memory makes sense only if you plan to spin up more services on top of it, e.g. some gallery, Nextcloud, Plex, VMs (especially VMs), etc...
Actually, the CPU seems to be the bottleneck with NW shares - the transfer of a single large file over 1Gbps easily eats up one of the two J3355 cores.

[joek1973]

Thanks for the advice, just in my nature to tinker. I can't see me needing to use VMs etc, not that sort of user. Possibly Plex at some point depending on how the family end up using it. I ran Twonky on my old QNAP which enabled the smart TV to stream from the NAS just fine, so maybe Plex. Cheers!

[titanrx8]

My f2-221 ran fine on the 3.x and 4.x TOS versions using the standard 2gb memory. Now, after updating to TOS 5, it's been running at near full memory and 100%cpu. TNAS support told me to expand the memory. I run nothing on this machine except rsync server. It backs up my other f2-221 once per day and takes less than 1 minute. Seems TOS 5 might need more memory than the standard configs.

[Charlie_Croker]

My TM (F2-422) has 4GB and is on TOS 5.0.150 and runs the following services.

AFP and SMB shares
Time Machine to 6 Macs
Plex Server
Terra Photos
Unifi Controller

Current CPU usage is 7% and Memory usage is 17% (about 700MB)

[scavenger_ro]

As long as you buy only Terramaster RAM, (3rd party ram will block TOS from loading) you will be able to use more services, but basically if you don't use any virtualization you should be good with the included 4GB.

Another advantage is that memory usage usually increases in time (bugs, memory leaks) so basically having more memory will give you better uptime.