You’ll need a USB key with at least 2GB of storage for this project. Alternatively, you can buy a very small solid-state drive, install FreeNAS on that, and boot the server from it but investing in such an SSD is an unnecessary expense (unless you’re worried that someone might remove the USB drive without realizing the consequences).
You’ll install FreeNAS to this drive and boot from it, because you can’t run the OS on the same drive that you’re using to share files from. Before you begin your FreeNAS installation, obtain a USB thumb drive with a capacity of at least 2GB.
