Hi guys,
New user here, happy to say hello to everyone in the forum. This is my 1st post here and it might be a bit long one, so bear with me, as I have some questions at the end…
I have been willing for quite some good time to either buy a pre-built NAS, like Synology, QNAP or Asustor, or build it by myself. I read dozens of articles, reviews & other stuff about both areas and I came to the conclusion that I would better build my own NAS.
End of last year, together with my son, we built what was supposed to be a gaming/video-photo editing/NAS desktop system; well, it became only his gaming/video-photo editing system, while the NAS part of it became a no-go for me… it’s his toy in the end …
So back to the DIY phase, which I always enjoyed.
All my current stuff is stored on external USB HDDs, different sizes (500 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB) and tons of (still) DVSs, but also the internal HDDs inside my laptops/desktops. I know, not synchronized…
I had some of my HDDs attached to the USB port of my router, but it was not a good option for me, one of the HDDs crashed after a power outage and the read/write speed was quite awful.
Now what I want out of it:
- Purpose: store my quite big photo library and movies recorded by myself/family; docs; music library; books library
- Storage: big enough
- Scalable/Expandable: I’ll start with 2 x HDDs (4 TB most likely)
- Accessible: from my intranet & internet
- Served devices: couple of laptops (all Windows based), tablets, smartphones, Android mini PC
- NAS availability: it won’t be (yet) 24x7, I’d like to start it when I need it (at least for now)
- RAID: from what I have read, it would be most likely a no-go, rather I’ll prefer to use any sync possibilities of the NAS OS
Through all my readings about which OS would suit my needs (and tech skills), I came to the conclusion that OMV would best suit them. Now about the HW part, I read also quite many stuff either about different SBCs, or classic PC based architecture. What I have came up with, as a 1st shortlist of HW would be (but not yet concluded):
- Case: BitFenix Phenom Micro-ATX or Fractal Design Node 804
- MoBo: GIGABYTE B360M DS3H (or an equivalent MoBo with 4-6 SATA ports)
- RAM: Corsair Value Select 8GB DDR4 2133MHz CL15
- CPU: Intel Coffee Lake I3 8100
- PSU: be quiet! Pure Power 10 350W ATX24
- Storage: 2 x 4 (or 6) TB to start with (WD Red or Seagate Ironwolf)
- OS: Adata SSD 120 GB
As I have one of my Windows 10 Pro laptops laying around for quite some time, after watching TechnoDadLife’s video tutorials on this forum, I said what the heck, why waiting till I’ll have all the HW available.
This Lenovo G50-70 laptop has 2 hard disks, one SSD (120 GB used for OS) and one HDD (1 TB, used for storage, for now it’s only an empty NTFS formatted HDD)
So I prepared a 32 GB USB stick with the OMV 4 iso, I removed the bootable Wind SSD from my Lenovo G50-70 and replaced it with the Adata SU650 120 GB SSD. OMV 4 installation went smooth till the last step: remove the USB stick to boot the OMV from the SSD: well, the SSD was not seen as a bootable drive, instead it wanted to boot from LAN…
I entered BIOS and there surprise: my SSD where I installed OMV was not seen in BIOS. I tried any BIOS settings (I can post screenshots), though I cannot boot into OMV to set it up. Reading on some Lenovo forums it somehow look like it’s stuck with Windows, many people were asking how to install Linux on it.
To still play with OMV, for now I installed it as a VM under Win 10 Home, but I could not test it yet if any of my other PCs can see the shared folder I created on the 2nd HDD (the 1 TB one), it was quite late last night when I finished installing OMV this way.
Now the part of my burning questions:
- Is there any way to use the damn SSD 120 GB by changing any BIOS setting, so that the installed OMV on it can boot up?
- I started to read through the forum also, but I wasn’t able yet to find the answer to another question: 2 of my laptops are in the domain of the company I’m working for and I cannot change its domain or the workgroup. So is there any way that I will be able to map the OMV drive into these Laptops (Win 10 Enterprise, always latest build), so that I can copy/fetch files from/to the OMV NAS?
Thank you all & cheers