USB boot drive size

[rcrh]

Is there any advantage to using a larger USB drive for FreeNAS? I know it needs 2 gig and I've seen people suggest 4gig. But, quite frankly, USB drives are so keep I'm wondering if 8gig or 16gig would be beneficial or is the space simply ignored (and therefore wasted). Will FreeNAS use the extra space for cache or swap? (I'm curious 'cause I'm building my server in a box limited to 4gig or RAM - makes me think that 6 or 16 gig of swap space might help).

Thanks in advance.

 

[ProtoSD]

There's no advantage to anything over 4GB, the extra space can't be used for anything. The reason for suggesting 4GB over 2GB is that many 2's are less than 2 and FreeNAS will merrily go along and act like it was able to write out the entire image even it's little less than 2GB and then fail to boot. *Maybe*, at some point in the future the devs will provide a way to use the extra space.