This may be a stupid question

I havent seen anything listed on this. But is there a way to install on a flash drive? Right now I am running it in a vm for testing purposes. I dont have any ssd’s or anything but i have a ton of flash drives. I really like the way rockstor works and thinking about giving it a try permanently. I will just need to purchase a small ssd to run it on.

Yes you can. No special instructions necessary. When you pick the drive in the Partitioning screen of the installer, make sure it is your USB drive.

Some users have reported that 3.8-11 is not detecting USB drives due to 4.3 kernel. More on that issue here. I have a Intel NUC that runs off USB 3.0 pretty well. Experience and perception on USB varies widely and I personally prefer not to use USB 2.0 drives for the OS, for example as it can be slow. If you do go through with this and have issues with drive detection, try 3.8-10

If you have an extra PCI-e slot, you are better off purchasing a SSD boot drive like this. Depending on your hardware specs, you may have other options. Hope this helps.

well i was just wondering, because I know that it is not great to constantly write to a flash drive. I heard swap can give them issues. That is why i was wondering. But this is good to know though. Thanks

Flash has a limited life, so there is a legitimate concern. Good news is you can get a small SSD from Newegg or Amazon for cheap and call it good. Rockstor also sells PCIe SSD that seem like they would fit the bill too.

yeah right now i have it installed on an old 80 gb hard drive for testing. and I thought about getting the msata ssd card. Thanks for all of the help.

Yes, special instructions necessary. The default partitioning uses the LVM scheme; then Rockstor will sort-of boot, but all you get in the Web GUI is an error pop. You have to custom partition the USB in order to select the btrfs partitioning scheme. That is all the farther I have gotten as yet, I still cannot get the USB to boot

Correction, I did get it to boot. But the point about needing to use custom partitioning to get btrfs on the USB still stands.