I would have to see proof that is was low ram that caused the data loss.<p>The Recommendations for higher amounts memory comes from the way ZFS Caching works.  There are 2 caches,  ARC and L2-ARC.  L2-ARC has to be defined on a SSD and is optional.  ARC will always exist and ZFS will use every bit of free memory you have (unless you change the configuration to limit it) to build the cache..  why ram is faster that is why.<p>So the only scenario I could conceive of that would result in data loss is if you are writing files to the ARC faster than ZFS can commit them to disk but that seems unlikely and ZFS should not allow this anyway.<p>for Enterprise work loads the Recommend amount of Memory is 1GB per TB of storage.  This is for best performance, however my home server is 35TB and ran for about 2 years with 8GB, and recently upgraded the system to a new proc, mainboard and 16gb a memory,  have had no issues with either.  I have about 2-3 Movies streaming from it with about 3-4 devices&#x2F;computers connected for network file storage.<p>The more RAM you give ZFS the better performance you get (to a point) but I believe this issue is massively over talked about and hyped.