Configured a Raspberry Pi 3+ with micro SD card for boot and two 3.0 USB flash drives. I know that flash drives fail but this was just for experimenting. Initial setup was done with USB keyboard, HDMI monitor and USB mouse attached to the Pi board. After successful installation the system is running "headless".
All setup of the micro SD card was done using Linux Mint 19.1. Instructions on utube video for setting up the micro SD card did not work. Fix required decompressing the downloaded Rasbarian version of OVM and using the 'disk image write' function in the Gnome Disk program on Mint 19.1. Both USB 'sticks' were formatted with a DO
S partition system and a single Ext4 primary partition on each stick.
After initial boot login, the rest of setup was done via GUI in a Chromium web browser in Mint 19.1 using the reported IP address of 192.168.0.115. From this point I followed the utube video to finish the setup. USB 'stick' drive A was labeled as 'music" and USB 'stick' drive B was labeled as 'pictures'. Within the A drive 'music' I created folders and 'shares' for 'oldies', gospel, country, and 'western'. Within the B drive 'pictures' I created folders and 'shares' for backgrounds. All shares were set up and recognized as 'raspberrypi-SMB/CIFS icons and all allowed for read/write access by anyone.
System was rebooted 'headless'. Pi NAS was identified under 'network server' icon in Mint 19.1 as an icon along with a raspberrypi icon. The 'raspberrypi' icon represents the micro SD card and should not be used do to 'wear and tear' causing premature failure.
Files were copied, opened and deleted from Mint 19.1 directly, FreeNAS 11.2 and Windows 10 running on a USB SSD. The next test is to try wireless connections.