Aside from the obvious performance hit of not having the Stone Arrays, could someone conceivably build a slow Flame to use for training purposes?
First, Flame won't run without a Stone connected to it. Second, you still have to purchase the software, which runs you over 200k. Your only way to get a "cheap" flame, is to buy a really old one off ebay. The only "cheap" ones would probably be running on a first gen onyx(10 years old), or a first gen octane(8 years old). Flame has changed quite a bit since then. The amount of storage most of them have is probably pretty pidly compared to stuff these days. You can't just arbitrarily add drives to the Stone either, since all their serial numbers have to be licensed in order to add to the array. As some people call it, the "stone tax".