Boot-USB-Stick with Deduplication - anyone done this?

[Marc S]

I had a problem that my 4GB USB-stick filled up with automatic loaded and installed updates, and then got an idea:

Since new FreeNAS-versions should differ only marginally from each other, wouldn't the boot volume be the perfect candidate for deduplication?
"The dedup tables used during deduplication need ~8 GB of RAM per 1TB of data to be deduplicated"
So for a dataset on a 4 GByte USB-stick only 32 MByte RAM is needed.
Anyone done this already?

 

[Rilo Ravestein]

Why on earth would you want to use dedup on the boot device???

 

[dlavigne]

Replace the boot disk with at least an 8GB one (the minimum size for 9.3).

 

[Marc S]

Why on earth would you want to use dedup on the boot device???

Because a new version is only slightly different from its predecessor, so most of the files are identical.
Since deleting an old version yesterday gave me back quite some disk space, I thought a new version would bring new compiled, but identical files which dedup would compress.
If, however, a new version is made by taking a snapshot from the current version and then updating just the files that changed, then of course nothing is duplicated, and dedup is useless.

 

[Rilo Ravestein]

Just buying a bigger drive or deleting old versions seems like a far easier solution

 

[cyberjock]

Because a new version is only slightly different from its predecessor, so most of the files are identical.
Since deleting an old version yesterday gave me back quite some disk space, I thought a new version would bring new compiled, but identical files which dedup would compress.
If, however, a new version is made by taking a snapshot from the current version and then updating just the files that changed, then of course nothing is duplicated, and dedup is useless.

Yep, and the only files that are stored on the USB stick are the files that have changed. So dedup would be nearly pointless. On my 16GB DOM I currently have more than 30 environments and I'm only at 59%. I can promise you that FreeNAS needs more than 250MB for a fresh install.