4GB more than I'll ever need for boot drive?

[Lucien]

I saw a nice compact usb drive in the shops which looks ideal for use as a "plug and forget about it" device to boot FreeNAS from, but I was wondering which size drive I should get. The only spare drives I have at home are 1 GB in size, which I know isn't big enough.

I have a choice between buying a 4 GB drive and a 8 GB drive, and the price differential is pretty small. So I figured that if at some point down the road FreeNAS might need more than 4 GB for a boot drive (plugins?) I might as well pick up the 8 GB one. But is that likely to ever happen? Or will 4 GB be more than I'll ever need?

 

[Milhouse]

4GB will be more than you'll ever need. When plugins are supported, they'll be installed to your storage pool (eg. /mnt/tank/.freenas) not the boot media.

 

[jgreco]

4GB is *probably* more than FreeNAS will ever need, based on current statements by the developers. However, a year ago, they were saying install-on-1GB-devices, and then changed that to 2GB. If they were to change their minds and go to a larger image, say 4GB, it might not fit on some so-called 4GB devices, so the extra space isn't necessarily a horrible thing. Further, if you ever decide to ditch FreeNAS, being locked into a FreeNAS-sized device might be a downside. For a small price differential, you MIGHT want the larger device.

 

[dannyb78]

buy a 4GB device, we are talking about spending 10USD... if in future you'll need more space you'll buy a new device.
This should be a good idea in case of a major upgrade release cause in the "old" device you still mantain the old working system for use in case of need (eg problems with new rel) ;)

 

[Lucien]

Boy, lots of good advice...

The price difference *is* seriously small. There's a local place selling the 8 GB unit for what other places are asking for the 4! Not too surprising as USB drives are commodity items nowadays, and 4 - 8 GB is the "low end" of the market. The catch is they're out of stock for another week or so, but I should be able to wait - still waiting on some other bits to arrive. (Makes me wonder what my 128 MB unit is good for nowadays :p)

Is it possible to clone one USB device to another? I can't really think of why I'd want to do that right now, but I'm curious as to if it'd be possible.

 

[warri]

Under Linux dd is capable of cloning an usb stick incl. all of it's partition to any other storage medium you like.
I could imagine that such tools also exist for Windows and Mac.

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, for Mac, it's even called ... dd. Who-dd-athunk?