I am in the process of building a rig to run Sophos UTM. To reduce power consumption I would like to know if it is possible to install UTM to a flash drive?
As long as the flash drive is seen by the installer it is technically possible. However, installing the UTM software to a flash drive is strongly discouraged as the amount of disk activity will burn out flash drives in short order. You may have better luck with a conventional SSD drive but even then, there's no long term data on how hard the UTM is on those either.
Your best bet is to get a basic hard drive and not worry about flash or SSD. The few extra watts you'd save with flash isn't worth burning out the drive(and the headache or a rebuild from scratch), and SSD is pricy for what you get. The extra cost of SSD is better spent getting a few more GHz out of the CPU.
Not trashing SSD's as they're great in the right place (my workstation boots from bios screen to desktop in under 30sec, including password entry) but something like the UTM that's write heavy isn't.
As long as the flash drive is seen by the installer it is technically possible. However, installing the UTM software to a flash drive is strongly discouraged as the amount of disk activity will burn out flash drives in short order. You may have better luck with a conventional SSD drive but even then, there's no long term data on how hard the UTM is on those either.
Your best bet is to get a basic hard drive and not worry about flash or SSD. The few extra watts you'd save with flash isn't worth burning out the drive(and the headache or a rebuild from scratch), and SSD is pricy for what you get. The extra cost of SSD is better spent getting a few more GHz out of the CPU.
Not trashing SSD's as they're great in the right place (my workstation boots from bios screen to desktop in under 30sec, including password entry) but something like the UTM that's write heavy isn't.
