This is my server setup. It's laughable from what was installed last year, but needed to face reality. I had a full sized aluminum server rack and several Dell PowerEdge servers running many Linux Server Flavors each and an instance of OSX Server on a VM system. 6 3GB SATA drives in three units. After constantly blowing breakers and my kitchen floor vibrating from all the power supplies and Xeon fans (Jet Engines really) I had to rethink my needs.
This room also servers as my darkroom for film and photo developing, so I would literally need to gorilla tape every LED on every unit. All the storage I had and approximately 1% was used. I don't really trust anything with moving parts, so all my data gets stored until an eventual write to BDR.
My biggest need is storage space while traveling. I take a lot of photos and travel quite extensively to locations where I always... at some point, will have Internet and batch upload to my house in the U.S. In Asia the Internet is so poor that I use TenCent (Free 1TB Storage) and then need to batch download when I get home.
Sounds more daunting then it really is. I have managed to piece together an Intel i3 2.9GHz with 16GB 1600MHz DDR3 and a PNY 120GB SSD installed on a PCI to SSD Controller to keep my 4 SATA III ports available. Bought a Rosewell Rack Can and installed 2 Western Digital Reds 8TB (On sale $179 at BestBuy $179 Each) and 2 Western Digital Reds 4TB (On Sale at eBay $139 Each). Providing 24TB of storage space in a nice quite unit, even with fans on each drive, that I figured out how to bolt to my ceiling to get back some floor space.
I have also installed and setup CUPs on OpenMediaVault, which I have never done prior, and it's awesome. My Samsung Color Laser has built in ethernet and for some reason it would just shutdown and not WOL. Using CUPs I have zero issues.
Here's the Kudos...
I have experimented with FreeNAS, NAS4Free, UnRAID, RockStor and OpenMediaVault. By far, for my uses and experience level, OpenMediaVault has proven far superior to all the rest. I will openly admit that I have learned some serious things using the other fore mentioned distros, but for just wanting a system that works... Kudos goes to OpenMediaVault.
Building and installing every application one by one in a server distro is a daunting and needless task for most. If you're into it, go for it. I am not. I use to get paid for that s**t and hated every minute of it. I started with BSD and moved to Linux back in 96'. I went back to BSD for FreeNAS and NAS4Free... all it did was remind me what I hated about BSD. It takes 30 steps and 6 shell scripts to accomplish one task. BSD isn't "Rock Solid" because it's so beautifully coded... it's because no one has the time to hack it. Before anyone slams me for that, I do use Darwin regularly, sorry.
In any case, I have to say that I am impressed and extremely happy with OpenMediaVault and look forward to a long and wonderful journey with it.
