Prerequisites

openmediavault is the most flexible Network Attached Storage (NAS) on the market, this is because it relies on running on the operating system Debian GNU/Linux [9]

Any system has software and hardware requirements, also minimal ones and recommended ones.

Hardware requirements

Item	supported	Minimal	Best	Recommendation
DRIV	SSD/HDD/USB…	1,any	2,HHD	2 disks: Seagate Firecuda, WD Black, IronWolf
RAM	1GiB+ any	1GiB	4GiB	8GiB+ dual channel DDR4/DDR3
NIC	WiFi/Ether/USB	any	10Mb NIC	1GiB NIC or 10Gb NICs: SFP fiber
CPU	arm,x86,x64	32bit	64bit	Intel Dual Core, AMD Ryzen

Storage drives (DRIV)

This is the key of the system. openmediavault supports any drive hardware and any drive interface (SATA, ISE, SCSI, USB, SERIAL) but information and management will depend on the disk drives supported by Debian system. Supported Debian OS versions can be checked in the releases section.

Modern storage drives have firmware inside that reports several attributes. Any storage drives is supported but openmediavault only supports SMART for those disks that are connected to an HBA in pass-through mode.

The system manages two types of storage unit classification:

System drive storage (SDS)

The Storage Disk Drive(s) used to put the system program files. This system drive (which can consist of several partitions) cannot officially be used for shared resources or as user data drive. The recommendation for the system drive(s) hardware could be older spinning Hard Disk Drives (HDD), Disk-on-Module [3], CompactFlash [4] or thumb drives (USB), the Solid State Disks (SDD [2]) must be managed. Best option are the Helium Hard Drives (HHD).

Data drive storage (DDS)

The storage disk drive(s) where the user data will be stored. Cannot be the same of the system drive(s) and sizes will depend of the usage of the stored user data. Shared resources are managed over partitions, which is discussed in the software requirements topic below. The recommendation for the Data drives must be Solid State Disks (SSD [2] disks) for best performance or spinning Hard Disk Drives (HDD) for better device durability over time.

For RAID, SnapRAID, or mergerfs setups, prefer CMR drives over SMR. SMR drives can stall during rebuilds and parity sync, and the recording technology usually isn’t obvious from the model number. A reference like the NAS CMR/SMR drive list helps you check before buying.

Memory (RAM)

Sufficient RAM is vital to maintaining peak performance. There are several combinations of installation sizes but the recommendation is at least 4GiB for novice administrators.

For best practice you should have 8GiB of RAM for basic operations in default installation, and no matter the size, RAM must be configured in Dual Channel mode [8] which will improve performance in low memory installations.

Unlike other NAS systems openmediavault can run in with as low as 1GiB of RAM, but of course will need expertise.

Network interface card (NIC)

A NAS system as means is a network oriented system, of course openmediavault is the most flexible NAS system in the world and allows multiple ways of communication, this is because openmediavault offers several modes of shared resources like RSYNC that do not depends on networking. But there are few key points:

NAS write speed to storage is limited to the speed of your NAS computer network interface.
NAS write speed to storage is limited to the speed of your network.
Write speed to storage depends on ratio of the number of users accessing it.

Full-duplex NICs are recommended, half-duplex NICs typically offer 10/100 Mbit/s and storage drives far exceed those speeds but are of course supported by openmediavault.

Any supported NIC vendor is determined by the support of the operating system where openmediavault system resides and runs, which is Debian GNU/Linux.

Architecture (CPU)

We have already denoted in the requirements table the supported architectures or processors (which reduces and determines which computers can be used) but this is really a reference since it is determined by the support of the operating system where openmediavault system resides and runs, which is Debian GNU/Linux.

Any computer system supported by the common requirements of Debian operating system could be an openmediavault system installation target. Currently supported are AMD64 (x86/x86-64 64bits), i386 (x86 32bits), ARMv7+ARMv8 (arm64 64bits armel/armhf 32bits). The i386 version is no longer officially supported since version 6, although it is still published by the project due to the nature of openmediavault technology.

Software requirements

Item	Software	Minimal	Best	Recommendation
OS	Debian Linux	13	13
BOOT	BIOS,UBOOT,UEFI	BIOS,mbr	BIOS, GPT	Disable Secure boot, GPT table
SDS	HDD,SSD,USB…	1, 4GiB	2, 120+500GiB	Disk drive with 120G root size, 8G swap size
DDS	HDD,SSD,USB…	0 or any	HHD,1 per share	One disk or part per shared resource
NET	LAN,WAN,SAN,VPN	LAN	SAN,PAN,LAN	Fiber IPv4, or at least cable LAN

Operating system (OS)

openmediavault is a piece of software, it resides and runs under a key software OS named Debian GNU/Linux as “the universal operating system” [9]

Supported Debian OS versions can be checked in the releases section.

While possible to deploy in a virtual environment, depending of the nature of virtualization it will degrade the performance access in various ways. Installation in LXC or any other container based solution is not supported.

Whatever the situation, openmediavault assumes that target operating system does not have any previous installation of any of the programs used by openmediavault dependencies:

software	package	related to	Observations
http server	nginx	web interface	port 80 must be free at installation
http system	php	web interface	only OS php packages wil be used!
display GUI	lighdm,xdm..	Desktop install	Conflicts, any will be deinstalled
network man	netplan.io	Networking	network is managed by openmediavault with netplan
ssh server	ssh	Remote access	any configuration will be managed
smb server	samba	Shared drives	any configuration will be managed
quota man	quota	Quota manage	any configuration will be managed

Device boot (BOOT)

The boot type and its support is determined by the Debian operating system which supports BIOS, UEFI, PXE, UBOOT and many others, the configurations of these depend on the installation of the operating system and once done the openmediavault can be installed without problems.

However the downloadable and ready-to-use ISO image from the official openmediavault website only supports AMD64 with BIOS mode boot at the moment. If you want to have openmediavault on other computers with another boot type/mode, then you should install Debian first and then manually openmediavault.

Supported Debian OS versions can be checked in the releases section.

System drive storage (SDS)

Any brand of storage disk will be supported as long as it is supported by Debian since it is where openmediavault system resides and runs, check it at the releases section.

The system storage disk will be fully managed and taken over by openmediavault after installed. In case of the official ISO installation, will automatically partition the system storage disk drive into 3 partitions. See table below for details.

In case of a manual installation on a previous Debian operating system, this drive should have at least two partitions. See table below for details.

Partition	Minimal	Best size	Mandatory
`/boot`	256MiB	500MiB	Optional, partition used to boot
`/`	4GiB	120GiB	Yes, the partition were system install
`swap`	100MiB	16GiB	Optional, the partition for virtual ram

Data drive storage (DDS)

The data storage disk will be partially managed by the openmediavault after installation, and only in customized installation this can be a partition of the same system drive storage.

Each data storage drive will be managed, but regardless of the partitioning scheme, all data drive partitions will be mounted at the /srv/ path. The data storage drive must be a different disk drive than the system disk drive where the operating system is installed. One partition of each data drive can handle one or many shared resources.

Partition	Min size	Best size	Mandatory
`/srv/<*>`	100MiB	bigger	Yes, size as need! E.g. 128GiB,500GiB,4TiB

Technical notes

Take into consideration that the more customized the installation is, the less supported it could be.

openmediavault allows for deployments on systems with low hardware/software specification, at the hands of knowledgeable operator while other NAS systems allow ease of use at the cost of high requirements. openmediavault allows both as well in a well balanced use case! [7]

About minimal or custom setups

Please note that openmediavault systems can be installed on just 4GiB of system partition, with no more than 1GiB of RAM and using a WiFi or USB connection to access it remotely, on any small device such as Raspberry Pi or Banana Pi boars which are ARM, or old i386s machines no matter if those are 32 or 64 bits, but of course as more unique the configuration the more knowledge will be need as per issue comment #131.

Technically OMV can be installed on a single storage disk, this is possible if it is done on a previously configured Debian system, with a free partition apart from the 3 necessary system partitions, previously formatted and configured. Of course this is only possible for skilled Linux users.

Drive Storage technical details

System Drives are not managed as same of Data Drives. System drives are not so intensively used, but Data Drives will need tricks to extend the useful life. Drivers support is by the project https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/TocSupport

If you use a Flash Drive, select one with static wear leveling 6, without this the drive will have a very short lifetime. It is also recommended to install and activate the Flash Memory plugin.

In the same Solid State Disk, or rather Drive (SSD) for x86 based architectures, is usually only recognized properly by the BIOS or UEFI, when in the BIOS/UEFI the feature AHCI has been activated for SATA (instead of IDE). Modern computers have that by default. But on old machines the default might/could be IDE. About ARM based computers this is not a problem, when used SATA interfaces, but on eMMCs will need some tuning because they are treated like Flash drives.

On SSDs, the cleaning action TRIM is recommended for sustained long-term performance. Otherwise it might become slow with time. Very old SSD’s from before 2010 usually don’t support TRIM.

Take note that eMMCs, SSDs, Flash drives will have a lifetime degradation, excessive writes wear out those drives faster, specially in they are very cheap.

On SSDs Hibernation (suspend-to-disk) causes a huge amount of write actions, openmediavault is a server system so it is expected to stay always on or off.

About compression or encryption

Enabling encryption on SSDs also means more writes which wear out SSDs, eMMCs or Flash drives faster.

As well as enabling compression on filesystems like Btrfs or ZFS; although Ext4 has better commit timing; a parameter with commit=600 to 800 is best for this particular one.

Partition table technical details

Of course, the supported partition tables will depend on the installation mode, and openmediavault can handle any type of partition table supported by the Debian. This is because to manage shares on new or uninitialized storage drives it will need to create partitions or at least read structure of them.