OMV uses PHP, Ajax, Debian, all of the things i’m already familiar with, which in the long run makes it easier on me. From what I read online OMV is actually developed by some of the old developers who were working on FreeNAS. OMV was an easy choice to me after going through and testing, as it’s a Debian flavored OS, meaning I can pretty much run anything I want on it, including Plex Media Server. Unraid is nice as well, but with Unraid once you want to upgrade to a large number of drives…you have to PAY FOR IT! FreeNAS is nice, it works, but seems to be lacking some of the features I needed or would need, and would be a little more complicated to hack apart and play with. So as I mentioned above I tried using FreeNAS, Unraid, and a couple others out there…but none of them really did it for me. But before I start to go on and on about why I love OMV, let me go over why I didn’t choose any of the others… Why OpenMediaVault over others Unfortunately ZFS is not supported on Open Media Vault, but even with it missing that functionality, everything else about OMV made up for it.

One of the main things I wanted to try and use was the ZFS filesystem, which would allow me to use different size hard drives while still being able to have some type of redundancy if a drive were to fail. Setting up a media center server can be tricky, especially with all the options out there. My main concern was having a media center server that could be used as a NAS (or something similar), but still have the ability to add software to run on it such as Sickbeard, Couchpotato, etc. Originally I started with Ubuntu, then moved on to FreeNAS, then Unraid, and finally Open Media Vault. So i’ve been slowly building my home media server for a while now, testing out different distros, different NAS software, and I have finally come to the software I will be using from now on.

Plex media server linux mint at startup