CC1310: CC1310 NVS (Custom hardware)

I am currently using a CC1310-LP only as the debugger to program/test my custom board with a CC1310. My custom CC1310 board only contains the critical components required for operation (resistors, capacitors, crystals etc). I am working to gain a better understanding of the use of external NVS, with that I am confused when I run the "nvsexternal" example from the SDK and I do not get any failures upon  NVS_open(), NVS_getAttrs etc and get values returned for regionAttrs such as  Sector Size: 0x1000 - Region Size: 0x20000 (same values as a full functional CC1310) . Once again my custom board does not have any external NVS so I would expect failures to occur, but they don't. I plan to add external NVS via the SPI interface but I am wanting to gain a better understanding that is happening before I proceed. One thing that does happen as expected is no data is written to the NVS (because there is none) but I want to understand why the other parts of the code are operating they way they are.