May I introduce this little guy? Called NanoPI NEO 2, equipped with Gigabit Ethernet, 4 USB2 ports that have not to share bandwidth, idling below 1W, smaller than a Raspberry Pi but at the same time way more performant as a NAS:
You get some OMV performance numbers here: http://www.cnx-software.com/20…ion-setup-and-benchmarks/ (so approximately 3.5 times faster than a Raspberry Pi and at 40 percent of what a really performant Gigabit Ethernet NAS will deliver).
Why do I mention this device? Since
- cheap ($16 with GPIO headers already soldered)
- energy efficient
- somewhat decent NAS performance
- Hardware vendor that cares about details and came up with own OMV images that do not suck
- useable for other tasks at the same time (think about home automation, GPIO stuff, low performance server and so on)
I've to admit that I'm doing storage for a living and the usual NAS/RAID gear we use has PSUs with +1000W ratings. Somewhat annoying so we started to explore energy efficient NAS setups based on MIPS and ARM few years ago (and ended up with ARM only). In the past almost all low cost ARM boards suffered from really horrible software support (shitty outdated kernels combined with brain-dead settings leading to underwhelming NAS performance) so community projects like Bananian or Armbian had to fill the gap. In the meantime Armbian's fully automated build system can also be used to generate OMV images for supported ARM devices from scratch.
But AFAIK it's the first time that an ARM dev board vendor is committed to support his own hardware with a decent kernel version, good settings and an own OMV image. And since this NEO 2 is both inexpensive and somewhat performant IMO it's really worth a look to build a NAS based on this small device if performance requirements allow it.
BTW: In the first link above there's a '1-bay NAS Dock v1.2' mentioned. This thing is a nice way to combine NEO 2 with a 2.5" disk but I personally prefer the ability to use a 3.5" HDD also with this PCB. Please be aware that the NAS PCB that is currently listed in their online store is the wrong one (that's PCB rev 1.0 using a worse USB-to-SATA bridge and also not exposing at least I2C unlike the PCB 1.2 rev).
