Open media vault on pine64?

[tkaiser]

I think that if I got it working it would be perfectly sufficient for my needs. As a side note, do you think that adding a an externally powered USB hub could remedy the power issue? 

Such a powered hub is a prerequisite for external USB disks that don't come with an own PSU. Or the Pine64+ with 2GB DRAM and jumper setting DC-IN instead of BAT when also powered through the Euler pins. But in this mode you can't use a connected 3.7V battery to play UPS.

Given the DC-IN problems (undervoltage, max. current limited to approx. 1.8A by Micro USB), the current limitation of the USB port and both bandwidth and IOPS limitations of the USB port it simply makes absolutely no sense to use Pine64 as a NAS when way better boards are available. One exception: Being a Plex server since to my surprise Pine64 has enough horsepower to transcode a lot of movies that slower boards running with the 'NAS optimised' A20 would fail on.

Ok, great, that puts this to rest then

Really for NAS use cases I/O bandwidth matters more. A nice A20 equipped Olimex Lime2 for example with a 3.7V battery and connected 2.5" SATA disk is a perfect example for a small, fast and reliable server (since here you don't run in undervoltage problems and the power limitations of the USB ports are higher so that even a spinned down disk when running on battery is not a problem when it suddenly wants to spin up again -- peak consumption 1A). And a few H3 boards do exist that feature 3 real USB host ports instead of just one like with Pine64. And ironically in Pine64 BSP we found an A20 successor called A20E that might be a little bit faster regarding CPU speed than A20 but has still SATA (and maybe an implementation that shows better SATA write speeds). Really: A64 is nice in other areas but not as a NAS.

BTW: I just had a look whether it's as easy to install OMV as it was with Plex, the usual

Code:

echo "deb http://packages.openmediavault.org/public kralizec main" >/etc/apt/sources.list.d/omv.list
dpkg --add-architecture armhf
...

approach. But this armhf OMV package is somewhat smelly (outdated) and requires PHP5. And while it's possible to install outdated PHP versions it's no good idea. So I dropped the idea since Pine64 is the wrong device for a NAS anyway...