Wyse C90LEW Thin Client

Hello OMV users!

I've been using OpenMediaVault for a few months now, initially with an old Raspberry Pi and a dusty 1 TB USB external drive. The performance wasn't great, but it was functional enough for me to begin sorting through my old files.

About a month later, I decided it was time for an upgrade. I began to do research on cost effective NAS devices and decided that a thin-client would be my best option. I looked around until I came across the Wyse C90LEW. It features a 1.0 GHz VIA x86 CPU, 2 GB of on-board flash, 1 GB of RAM, 4 USB 2.0 ports, and a gigabit Ethernet port. It cost only $30 USD, and uses as much as 7 watts of electricity. I installed OpenMediaVault to the on-board flash, which is a bit tight but enough for a basic install. I made to sure setup OMV Extras too, in order to make use of the FlashMemory plugin.

Less than a month ago I purchased a 2 TB WD Elements external hard drive, since my old 1 TB WD My Book Essentials was beginning to show its age. It cost me $78 USD, and showed up quickly thanks to Amazon. Copying the partitions with GParted Live took a little over 8 hours over the USB 2.0 ports, averaging around 20 MB/s between the drives.

This image should give a nice idea of the amount of space I gained, note that there's another 320 GB partition not being shown.

Overall the configuration is definitely usable, and was worth the reasonable $108 investment to centralize and organize all of my data. I would like to thank the OpenMediaVault team for creating such a versatile system, and I can't wait for OMV 3.0 (the beta is amd64 only, unfortunately). I should post some pictures and perhaps some benchmarks shortly.

Thanks for reading!

I took a picture of my current setup. I also forgot the mention that I'm also hosting my images on it, thanks to the Nginx (websites) plugin. It's definitely nifty to be able to put things onto the internet at the speed of LAN!

Zitat von Eryan

Nice build! I personally find that these thin clients are an awesome option for a home NAS. They are kind of limited, but for basic NAS usage they are more than enough. Plus, they are quiet and energy efficient.

Thanks! Performance is decent enough for me, over 11 MB/s over Ethernet and WiFi. If I upgraded to a gigabit router I'd probably get better performance and hit the speed limit of USB 2.0. I can run my networking equipment on my Uninterrupted Power Supply for about an hour before it runs out. All together I use a continuous 30 watts.

Zitat von Markess

Thanks for sharing your build!

I'd just picked up a motherboard with the same family VIA CPU for use with OMV as a back-up target for my family's computers. I wasn't concerned with speed, but had some doubts about if the VIA CPU could handle it at all. So, it was good to see someone has already had some success with it!

Yep, I just put the OMV image onto a flash drive and booted it. There are some complaints about microcode during boot-up, but that hasn't affected anything. I didn't expect any issues since it's the same CPU architecture, just made by a different company.