Is it possible to use the USB boot drive as a ZIL/L2 ARC device

[JChrisHolmes]

I picked up a high speed USB drive thinking that I could use it to both boot from and at least as a ZIL drive, but fdisk doesn't work when I boot from it, and the drive already has the maximum of 4 partitions (with 30 gig of wasted space).

Is it possible to repartition the USB image (of the 4 partitions, can I just nuke any of them safely)?

And my next question is assuming I can do that, can I get the extra partition automatically mapped as a drive in freenas?

Thanks,
Chris

 

[ben]

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Nooooooooooooooooooooo. Do not mess with the flash drive. It will not work, and anything you cobble together will break every time you upgrade. Do not nuke the partitions. Do not try to use the boot drive as a storage device (as far as ZFS is concerned, ZILs and L2ARCs are storage devices.)

Edit: Basically, if you want to use that high-speed device, feel free... but buy a standard 4GB flash drive to boot from. FreeNAS is designed with that in mind.