Recommended reading: How to Boot from SSD on Raspberry Pi: A Detailed Walkthrough Install the base system for OpenMediaVault You’ll need two storage drives anyway, so a combination of an SD card (or USB stick) for the system and the external USB drive (SSD or not) is great for this project. My favorite model is this one, and SSD drives are now really affordable, go for it (USB adapter included). SSD drive: If you expect more performance, a Raspberry Pi and an SSD allow you to run systems really fast and get the best response time when opening your files.There’s no need to think more about it, get a Raspberry Pi 4 with at least 4 GB, you won’t regret it.
Raspberry Pi 4: The Raspberry Pi 4 is supported by OpenMediaVault, and it’s the best option available currently.
This one is the best model available right now (and often available at a discount). Fast & big SD card: For a file server, I recommend a big SD card (at least 128 GB) so you can keep everything on it.Recommended hardware to host a file server at home I have no doubts that some of you are gods with Linux, but there is no reason to avoid adding comfort to managing our Raspberry Pi server. I no longer had the web interface, but the Samba configuration remained the same and the file share still worked.Īnyway, the idea here is to keep things simple for a home project.
In my job, I even switched from OpenMediaVault to native Debian on some servers (because I needed to update the base system, but OMV wasn’t available with the latest version at the time). You can absolutely do the same thing by using Samba and a few other packages, but the installation, configuration, and maintenance are way more complicated ( I have a complete guide about that if you want, even if it’s just to take a look at the difference). But this tool doesn’t reinvent the wheel.īasically, it will install the main components of a file server (like Samba) and provide an interface between you and the configuration file ( a bit like Webmin, but dedicated to the file server, and slightly better I think). The first third of the book teaches you the basics, but the following chapters include projects you can try on your own.Īs explained in the introduction, the main goal of OpenMediaVault (OMV) is to install a file server and give you a nice web interface to manage it. It’s a 30-day challenge where you learn one new thing every day until you become a Raspberry Pi expert. If you’re looking to quickly progress on Raspberry Pi, you can check out my e-book here. This article will explain each step in detail, so you can use the software on your device and easily create a file share at home. It can be used to host and configure a file server via a web interface in a few clicks. OpenMediaVault is a network-attached storage (NAS) solution that can be installed on any Debian-based distribution, such as Raspberry Pi OS (Lite). I’ve used this distribution a lot, so I will explain how to use the distribution on a Raspberry Pi in this article. It’s a web interface to manage everything on your devices: from your storage drives (detection, mounting, formatting) to your file sharing (creation, permissions, etc.). If you want to host a file server on your Raspberry Pi, OpenMediaVault (OMV) is a great choice that will make your life easier.