FreeNAS is famous for recommending the upper tier of ZFS requirements.
You can, and many people often do, run ZFS on a fraction of what FreeNAS recommends. In fact I’ve had ZFS running on a 32bot processor with 4GB RAM before. I’ve also had it running on 64bit with 2GB available RAM and it ran just fine for personal use.
However in fairness to FreeNAS, they are following best practices as defined by Sun/Oracle. It’s just those bear practices are defined with enterprise in mind.
You can, and many people often do, run ZFS on a fraction of what FreeNAS recommends. In fact I’ve had ZFS running on a 32bot processor with 4GB RAM before. I’ve also had it running on 64bit with 2GB available RAM and it ran just fine for personal use.
However in fairness to FreeNAS, they are following best practices as defined by Sun/Oracle. It’s just those bear practices are defined with enterprise in mind.