Hi All
I’ve setup OMV on my pi4 and it works pretty well.
Just wondering though, do I need application like OMV to have my pi act as a NAS for other devices on my local network, or could I hang a 5tb HDD off the pi and have other devices access it by SMB or similar?
What’s the benefit of running OMV over setting up a server style system on my pi with an external HDD…
For more context this is going to be used for live events where I have 4-5 content machines accessing event client and 2 client producers updating and loading content. Currently this is done using google drive but I want to eliminate all the uploading and downloading on multiple devices to speed things up in a live event environment.
Thank you!
bpt
I have not used OVM before, but a very quick look at the website, my best guess answer to your question will be what it provides and abstracts for you (to keep it easier to manager) v you doing all the work for each bit.
I think this will come down to what features you really want/need and do you want to do it your self (e.g. samba) or something to manage it for you.
My only comment around setting up a nas (which I have done off the rpi a few times, last one had 2x 2TB USB SSDs; will be to mount and format the drives using the native format (e.g. ext4) that best meets your needs, maybe even runing LVM over it. I am assuming you will connect via usb (?) as such I would mount in fstab via the drive name/id and not /dev/sdXY sort of thing. I have seen usb drives get mounted to a different mount point on reboot when I had more then one.
So, to repeat, plot out the features you want and/or need then see how hard that is to do by hand v some software already written.
At the end of the day, the software will just be doing what you can do, but someone has automated and ironed out any gotchas.
It all comes down to the specific application you are wanting to server.
Both ways will work for your application fine. It may be easier to manage user access permissions in OMV compared to a full desktop.
It comes down to what you need the machine to do. If you can get away with OMV and the additional software that can be run in docker then it might be a good option.
If you also needed the pi to run additional programs on top of being a NAS that aren’t implemented in OMV then running a more robust OS may be the better option.
