By now I am very new to OMV but not to NAS systems at all. After years of using Freenas since early V7 time has come to try something else. Until now I was using a self-build NAS only on the job, mainly as a playground and just for data transfers. For serving VM data I use two big QNAPs and an ancient EMC AX150i for storing Win PC system backups with scheduled cmd files.
Well, this playground runs on an Intel S975XBX2 board with a Dual Core @2,66, 6gb RAM and four WD RE3 1tb drives. Not that bad and the switching hardware is upper class. But with Freenas data read and write does not break the 60mb/s barrier. As far as I remember it was going better with the V7, but that's long ago. Network power is all I need and I put a dual NIC Intel PCIe in this box, teamed the links with LACP over a VLAN and it runs. But after replacing the switching hardware from 3COM 5500EI to HP 3800 Freenas does not bundle the links again, no matter what I try.
That was the point where I decided to give OMV a shot, some three days ago. Now the box is up and running and I get read and write transfer speed about 90-100mb/s only using the onboard NIC. Without any fine tuning.
The story is very different at home. For years I have been using an old Promise NS4300 just for storing videos and music. It simply works, not fast, but reliable. Now my wife discovered all the music and videos on our network and watching video with two devices brings the Promise to it's limit. Read speed at 20mb/s is not that fast and cabling and switching hardware can deliver much more. I have a HP 1810G-8 switch, this is an 8-port Gigabit switch with the internal switching engine of the 24-port version, this thing is really fast.
So I decided to buy a faster machine (What I believed to be faster), an used Thecus N4100PRO. Put some brand new and compatible Seagates 2tb drives in, let it build a Raid5 and go. But the read and write speeds were ridicolous, not faster than the old Promise. No matter which firmware I tried, no matter which Raid version, it was slow.
So I put it back to the bay, received the same money I spend for it and bought some hardware to make my own build. A Bitfenix Prodigy case, an ASUS E45M1-I DELUXE ITX board with 8gb ram and the four Seagates. Installed OMV on an USB stick and right now it is resycning the new raid with a speed of 120840k/sec while the CPU is nearly idle at about 20% load. That gives me hope for much better speed, the CPU of the Thecus box was at 100% while resyncing.
Finally I want to say thanks to all the people for making this great piece of software. By now I am just beginning to discover all the corners and I like what I see.