Flash Drive File Server Distribution Recommendations
 

I'm hoping that someone can recommend a file server distribution that is suitable to run from a USB Flash Drive. I have looks at the FreeBSD offerings but none really hit what I want. Mainly because I'd like to run software raid in Linux so that I can have an expandable Raid 5 Configuration.

I have looked at a couple of the file server distros but they say they aren't suitable to run from a flash drive, I think it because they write log files to the flash drive and wear the flash drive out.

Are there any distros that will alow me to run on a flash drive without problems, and raid 5+ Sata drives, as a samba file server??

Thanks

Dave.

Any distro will do that. If you are concerned about wearing out the Flash drive simply put the log files on the mechanical disks.

While I could customize any Distro to do what I want, there are some that are optimized for file server, e.g. OpenFiler and OpenMediaVault however neither of these recommend installing on a flash drive, probably for the reason I mentioned. Can anybody recommend any distro that are optimised for this sort of install like Nas4Free etc are?

- Voyage Linux (Debian based)
- Alpine Linux

both are targeted at embedded systems (and flash drives), but are generalist, not file server out of the box.

Thanks I had head of Voyage Linux been used in conjunction with OpenMediaVault, but the penny didn't drop that the flash drive wa probably the reason why :-) I shall investigate further.