Is a larger boot flash drive useful?

[tji]

I have a couple CompactFlash cards which I can use to boot my NAS device, one is 4GB and one is 16GB.

If I put the FreeNAS image on the 16GB drive, will the remaining space be usable? Or, does it write the boot disk with a set size & partition scheme that I shouldn't mess with?

 

[jgreco]

It writes a fixed size. There is no particularly good way to use the remaining space.

 

[joeschmuck]

The current FreeNAS image uses all four partitions so you cannot rework the FAT Table and gain the use of that extra space. Or should I say, I wouldn't try to rework the partition sizes although if you're good you could rewrite the code to use a larger device and create larger partition tables but this would be custom software and upgrading in the future might be difficult to impossible and a full re-installation would be required.

As far as selection of which flash card I'd use, I'd choose which ever one has a faster read/write speed so boots are slightly faster and whenever a write operation occurs, it's just a little faster.

 

[tji]

Thanks for the responses. I will switch to the 4GB drive, I can use the larger one elsewhere.