Mini PC OpenMediaVault NAS 

The Explaining Computers mini NAS universe expands once again!

I've been waiting for you to do something like this for ages, it's always interesting to see how other people setup their mini PC, what hardware and software they use.

You made a great job of explaining this process, Chris. I'm sure loads of people will find this very helpful. Thanks for sharing.

Thank you Chris for explaining at a speed that an interested but not expert viewer can cope and also absorb your information.

Always a pleasure to have simple but accurate vids from you, Chris. I’ve done tons of these but still I enjoy viewing the tutorial. 😊

Clear and concise tutorial, as always. I haven’t yet got around to setting up a NAS, but this video shows how easy it will be when I finally do it.

What fun.. I remember the OMV video you did on the raspberry pi.. I set it up on it and it ran wonderfully.. here we are now in the world of mini pc’s which have big capabilities for a small cash outlay.. I appreciate your detail and the expanded test fly-outs. Thanks for the video..

Great video Chris! I've been wanting to setup a NAS for a while now, and this is probably the perfect time for me to get started! :)

Thank you Chris, you always take the time to explain the smaller things that others leave out in such videos, and that's very much appreciated! Another great video from a great tutor....

Another amazing video. Absolutely love that setting up a NAS is so much easier now thank to software like OMV.

Scarily timely - I was looking for just this sort of functionality but would never have come up with this solution which looks perfect for what I want. Many (!!!) thanks Chris.

Just an absolutely fantastic tutorial. I've been looking for a Synology NAS alternative, and OMV seems the most user-friendly of the Linux based NAS systems. I also love Debian. 😊

You make this all look so easy, thank you, brilliant as always.

Excellent! Ive been running OMV for nearly 6 years now on my NAS. It works great. Ive actually been thinking about switching to a smaller platform with 2.5" SSDs or m.2 drives, so this video is right in line with what I'm considering doing.

Thanks very much. I love how concise your guides have always been.

Thanks Chris for this very relevant video, which, as usual, you have explained in a way making it clear how to proceed. I am going to set up OMV, on an HP mini PC, using an external archival hard drive, for more reliable long-term storage. Thanks for all your hard work and informative videos.

Thank you for being so organized and a top-notch teacher. Much appreciated!

Wow, today I got to learn about Open Media Vault... I wasn't aware how handy it was! As always thanks again Sir!

Thanks for taking the time to explain a bit about OMV and installation. Most videos I've watched on the subject seem to gloss over it and next thing its up and running LOL. I've already got a QNAP NAS, but I wanted to have a play around with a mini PC and some open source NAS software like OMV or FreeNAS to see how it holds up to my QNAP.

At 4:30 "4 3 2 1 Thunderbirds are go!" There is more to our beloved Chris than meets the eyes!! [I believe that he was referencing the stop motion cartoon Thunderbirds]

My humble thanks !! I would never have made this thing work without this excellent tutorial !!

Thank you very much, Chris. That was straight and to the point. Those mini PCs have many usages, and this application is a great way to utilize the hardware and the software.

As expected, yet another brilliant video! Many thanks

Very useful topic, well explained. Thank you for making this useful software accessible for the general public. if i tried to implement this simply by reading about it i don't think i would be feel confident in setting up the network access correctly. your comforting step by step explanations makes all the difference.

Hi Christopher, as always a brilliant topic and your explanations make it so easy to follow. Thank you!

Thanks as always Chris. OpenMediaVault has really come a long way since you first introduced me to it!

That was very useful, thanks! There is a lot to be said for mini PCs, particularly size, low wattage, and usually lack of fans. Those ducks need an agent.

The end of this video Quacked me up 😂 Great video mate.

The latest version of this software did not work on my brand new (11/2023) BMAX B1 Pro purchased from Amazon. I had to drop back to the most recent stable version and now it is running fine. I'm sure that it will be fixed in the near future, but I don't want to waste more time on the bleeding edge. Thanks for another great video. This was my first implementation of OpenMediaVault and it will not be my last.

Love the Gerry Anderson reference with the Thunderbirds Are Go line LOL! I'm a big fan of his work. I was a very young boy when his shows were broadcast on US TV.

@ExplainingComputers Love your style of presenting the video. Way cool. Will look into omv

Thanks Chris for a brilliant video, I've certainly got some ideas for my use case, linking up Linux mint, Win 11 & Android to our network. Green text on a black screen it took me right back to 1986, we had an Amstrad word processor in our office better, than a typewriter. Last but not least a test video of a happy duck, a happy Sunday to you :)

At the time I dont need this yet. However i foresee a time that I will. I've always wondered how to do this and now I know ! Thank you for taking the time to explain this, because for some reason I've always struggled on how to setup networks like this!

quality content! please do more tutorials like this, super helpful

Been using OMV for over a year. Great software for content storage.

COME ON PEOPLE! Chris is almost at a million subs! Let’s get him there -

Proper computing, this is my my new favorite phrase. And this perfectly describes my feelings for green text on a black background.

Bloody brilliant! Thank you, Christopher. My first time watching one of your videos. Subscribed. Cheers!

Greetings EC. That's one comprehensive tutorial video. Thank you! Have a great week !

Oh nice, just in time. I was gonna re-use my old PC (minus the case) for NAS, so this video gave me a great idea! Thanks!

Another fantastic video!!!! Thank you for the amazing content!

Very interesting. Thank you for this walkthrough, Chris.

Wow! Great and informative. Extremely useful for setting up and using while still being simple.

Something new i learned today. Clear explanation. Definitely going to implement this setup

We are using OMV as well, it's great. For our use case such small PC wouldn't be sufficient because of it's limited expandibility. So our NAS is based on a traditional desktop PC with four high capacity hard drives. Everything is nicely contained in a single box.

Excellent! This tutorial enabled me to set up a NAS step by step. Thank you!

Fabuloso. I love this stuff. Many thanks Chris.

Couldn’t click fast enough. You started me into the pi/omv universe with docker containers back in 2020. sadly the pi nas has been regulated to a backup role, I’ve moved onto building an awesome unraid server with truenas as a backup. I also run omv as a vm within unraid. Thx Chris, when I watched that first video back in 2020 I said I can do that!

I’ve got to admit this RU-vid channel is a guilty pleasure for me.

The clearest and most efficient explanation in the whole internet about this topic, haha! No kidding. This is the blueprint of how the "How to" videos should be made. Thanks

Sunday greetings all! Chris, you and I are again in sync. Green on black in the terminal should be standard for “real” computing. Occasionally I get really nostalgic and use amber on black. And yes, ducks are always good in videos. Stay well my friend!

Whenever I build a new pc or upgrade a previous system, I save the driver media or clone the original drive to a USB and tape those inside the case so I don't have to try to hunt down items in the future.

YES- i was just installing OMV last night on an old Tower PC, so this will help me finish setup.

Thanks Chris. Great Video. Must look at some of the older hardware I have sitting around my home office

I wish you had made this video 2 weeks ago Chris, lol. Last weekend I tried to setup TrueNAS, but it was a total minefield - and I wasn't prepared to spend hours and hours trying to figure out all those options. I eventually gave up on it and found Open Media Vault. Works great.

Chris extremely useful video very helpful to so glad I am a member. Loved it, Plan to make my own NAS like you did

Thank you so much Chris! really helpful video.

Nice a new minipc related video why i love to be that fast for avoiding people saying first have a nice one

Bonjour Chris, superbe et intéressante vidéo comme toujours 😊

I learned something new, I never knew of the .local prefix on the address bar still enjoy you videos.

“Green text on a black background is proper computing” - Couldn’t agree more 😂

An excellent video as usual. This will be my next project...

Great lesson in openvault. I'll look into doing an ov raid unit. Much thanks

Bish bash bosh, top level content 👍 What's most appealing about these kind of NAS and PC setups is their modularity and reduced costs, which together afford smart upgrade pathways and a sense of "future-proofing." Whilst raid is harder to implement, I cordially would suggest that it is superior to implement two of these platforms sans raid (coupled via rsync and jobs) than one bigco brand NAS that comes with vendor lock-in on both h/w and s/w. Kindest regards, neighbours and friends. Happy Sunday!

I love how you have the time to explain things that anyone can understand. My older brother was a computer engineer (retired now). He was an arrogant POS who did contract work for NASA and if I had problems with my computer he would say either go read a book or go to college and learn how to fix it yourself.

Chris... you always know what I want!

Great video, man!

Thanks for posting this. I have a fairly recent PC that can't officially run Win11, but has 6 SATA ports, will make a great NAS.

thank you to make us aware about this nice file sharing system and how to simplify setting it up

Another great video!

Suggestion for Part 2: - Setup MiniDLNA service - Setup Docker service and Portainer - Setup PLEX (in docker/portainer) - Setup Jellyfin (in docker/portainer) this will allow almost all devices to access the shared file system.

It seems so easy, I might give it a go. Great video

Another great video as always 👍😀

This is great! I also wanted to make a NAS with an old PC at my home!

Thank you, Chris! Good video! Very interesting.

EXCELENTE ! UN MARAVILLOSO REGALO PARA ESTE DOM8NGO ! ES ESTE CANAL.

This video and the others on the channel about setting up a NAS is the clinic on the NAS topic❗

Time add this to the RU-vid favourites folder ready for when I do my new build next year. 👍

I’m running OMV on a Lenovo mini PC. I have two 2TB SSDs for storage (mirrored using BTFS) and am using a USB flash drive for the system. If using a flash drive there is an add-on which needs to be installed to minimise writes, explained on the website installation section. It really helps if it is a fast flash drive otherwise installing updates and saving settings is very slow. I’m using a SanDisk Extreme Go 64GB which was £15 from CeX.

Thanks for another Fun video. I've done this and compared the SMB shares with NFS shares and also with iSCSI shares. Very interesting!

Whether it's with a good quality SBC, such as the Raspberry Pi (I'm not being objective here!) or a mini PC, it's becoming easier and easier for the average user (no negative connotation, on the contrary) to put together a file server, or even a small, high-performance multi-function server... We're back to the 'original dream' of the first digital creators: autonomy at affordable costs! Thank you for this excellent presentation! I think Lady Penelope would appreciate it!

Thanks, informative, and you have passed on some important information.

Excellent video! My old Intel NUC just found a new use! Thanks😃

Did not know about OpenMediaVault, I've always set up my NAS computers with pure Debian but this video did indeed spawn some ideas like you said

Already sunday's time goes fast !!! Chris have a good week, and all the viewers .......

I have a mini PC that has the same Celleron chip that's not getting used much. I think I will put it to work. Thank for all the great info a usual.

This was a great tutorial, thank you for putting this together. I was in search of a NAS solution for my usb external drive which I needed to access from various places. I ordered the bmax b1plus off ebay and followed your instructions precisely and was able to install it properly. A couple of places where I got stuck: the installer gives an option to connect with wifi and you can provide the ssid and password for the home wifi and connectivity was not an issue (the wifi interface drivers were built-in). The trouble is, after it reboots, following the installation, there's no internet connectivity over wifi. I had to connect to the console and use the command 'omv-firstaid' to bring up a config tool to setup my wifi credentials. After this it worked just fine. Another thing that I had to work with is that my usb drive was formatted HPFS or h+ filesystem. Apparently there's a limitation where NFS shares cannot be configured on top of an HPFS volume (seems that this is unsupported). I tried to format the usb thumb drive (the one I used to burn the iso image and boot off of) with ext3 filesystem and NFS seemed to work great for that. So I bought a new USB disk and will format it ext3 and start migrating my data onto that and then share it out as NFS share. Hopefully it will all work out in the end. Thanks again for this tutorial.

Nice video, as always.

I would love a part two with in depth features like software raid plugins syncing etc otherwise educational video

A very good video, that can help beginners to setup their first NAS for local usage, next step will be to explain how to setup the NAS in order to access it from the internet (cloud usage), with security features like encryption, VPN, perhaps you have already covered these aspects on another video.

Thanks for all your good work... J

Great Vid as always. For NAS i always advice using a proper Internal Static IP. Users should learn how to do that setup from their home router. After boot into OMV, they should check Date, region and Time Zone and Time itself. Reboot and check. Try to use 2 disks for Raid 1 at least and setup email notifications in case there is an error. Peace :-)

Excellent video Chris. You have a very good ability to explain in a concise and very understandable way. I just set up a Bmax B1 Pro - upgrade to the Bmax B1 Plus that you used. Following pretty much your exact steps I cloned the Windows 11 drive, then proceeded with the install of OMV. Wow, that was easy! I also added a 1TB SSD to the available slot. And will receive a 4 bay drive enclosure tomorrow to add to my storage. I have set up a Asustor NAS also, and found, following your instructions, this was simpler. Of course, part of that may have been due to a better understanding of the steps necessary, since this is now the second NAS I've set up. One problem I've had is that none of my computers will connect to the OMV Workbench by using the host and domain names. I have to use the IP address. Not sure what is causing that, I left the defaults, as you suggested. Also, initially, when I booted OMV, it was reporting incorrect, and atypical IP address, so I could not connect that way either. Eventually, after re-booting several times, it reported a typical IP address, and that one has worked. Small, puzzling glitches that I am not knowledgeable enough to explain, but for now, everything seems to be working as expected. It will be interesting, and probably entertaining when I attempt to add the 4 bay drive enclosure via USB and get the RAID configuration working. I have confidence, though, that I will eventually manage. OMV seems to be fairly straight forward, even for new users. Again, thank you. You do an excellent job explaining and demonstrating. So many gloss over some of the small, but very important steps required.

Great video, thanks a lot! You are in fact giving me some ideas... 😀

I used to know some chaps that started a band called the Megabytes. Funny thing was they never got a Gig....🤣👍😎

I wish I knew about this channel and had this video before I bought my Synology NAS a few months ago.

Thnx for another informative video (and special thnx for including those ducks in the park). A deeper dive into the OMV userinterface would be appreciated anyway, maybe you might to do in the next OMV related video? ;-)

That Amiga clock cursor looks amazing! 😃

Good stuff. Thanks! 👍

I hear "Thunderbirds are GO!" i upvote :P