Set up OpenMediaVault on RPI5

In my dealings with MagicMirror and the work I have been doing there, I have seen a few people mention the word NAS and “pulling” their photos from their NAS into their MM setup for display. This triggered some research and the more I read about self-hosting it made sense to me. No reliance on any Cloud storage that you have to pay for and as for privacy, that was front of mind. This meant I had to setup my own NAS to bring my media back under my own control.

The Journey

I only had a RPi 3B+ at hand and as I wanted to check this out, I decided to use that.
And thus, the initial setup was as follows.

🔧 What You’ll Need:

Raspberry Pi 3B+
microSD card (8GB minimum, 16GB+ recommended)
USB external hard drive or SSD (or large USB flash drive)
Raspberry Pi power supply
Ethernet cable or Wi-Fi (Ethernet preferred for stability/speed)
Raspberry Pi OS installed (Lite version is fine if you’re using SSH)

🪛 Step-by-Step Setup

Set Up Raspberry Pi OS

Download Raspberry Pi OS from https://www.raspberrypi.com/software
Use Raspberry Pi Imager to flash it to your SD card.
Boot the Pi and configure basics (sudo raspi-config), including hostname, timezone, SSH, etc.

Update Your Pi

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Connect Your Storage Drive

Plug in your external USB drive
Find the drive:

lsblk

Mount it (e.g., to /mnt/nasdrive:

sudo mkdir /mnt/nasdrive
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/nasdrive

Make it mount on boot:

sudo blkid  # Get UUID of the drive

Add to /etc/fstab:

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Add a line like:

UUID=your-drive-uuid /mnt/nasdrive ext4 defaults,nofail 0 0

Install Samba (for Windows/macOS access)

sudo apt install samba samba-common-bin -y

Configure Samba Share
Edit config:

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

Add at the bottom:

[NAS]
   path = /mnt/nasdrive
   browseable = yes
   writeable = yes
   only guest = no
   create mask = 0777
   directory mask = 0777
   public = no

Create Samba User

sudo adduser yourusername
sudo smbpasswd -a yourusername

Restart Samba

sudo systemctl restart smbd

Accessing the NAS

On Windows: open File Explorer and go to \\raspberrypi.local\NAS or use the IP
On macOS: in Finder > Go > Connect to Server: smb//raspberrypi.local/NAS

Now, this works just fine if you want a simple setup and manually transferring you media to your NAS. This was not my ideal setup and I did a little more digging.
This lead me to OMV, OpenMediaVault. OMV, as it is known for short, is a full-featured NAS web interface. However, this is much too heavy to run on a Pi 3. I then decided to take the plunge and ordered an RPi5 8Gb. Had to wait a few days for this to arive.

I initially looked at Synology. Now, some of you would ask what is Synology? Well,
Synology is a Taiwanese corporation that specializes in Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. The Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM) cannot run on a RasberryPi because:

DSM is closed-source and designed only to run on Synology’s own custom x86 and ARM-based hardware.
It requires specific hardware drives and bootloaders that the Pi does not support
Synology doesn’t officially support DIY installations or non-Synology hardware.

For the above reasons I decided to go with OMV.
OpenMediaVault (OMV) is a free network-attached storage (NAS) solution based on Debian Linux. It’s designed for home and small office environments which made it perfect for my scenario.

NOTE

I installed OMV on my Pi 3B and tried setting up my 1TB SSD but this seemed to keep failing and giving me endless issues. Reason being that the Pi 3B does not play well with that big storage.

⚡ Power Issues
- Pi 3B+ has limited power, especially for 2.5" HDDs or SSD’s which causes it to continously disconnect.

The above was one of the main motivators for me getting my Pi 5 as it has dedicated USB 3 ports which works well with the SSD.
What I saw on the Pi3B was:

The driver for the USB controller dwc_otg_hcd does not support scatter-gather which is required by the UAS driver.

This confirmed two important things:

The USB-to-SATA adaptor supports UAS (USB Attached SCI) – a faster, more efficient USB protocol used by many SSDs and modern enclosures.
The Raspberry Pi 3B+’s USB controller (dwc_otg_hcd) does not fully support UAS, and can’t handle “scatter-gather” operations

What follows is the setup of OMV on my RPi 5.

🖥️ Raspberry Pi 5 NAS Setup with OpenMediaVault and External SSD

This guide walks through installing OpenMediaVault (OMV) on a Raspberry Pi 5, adding an SSD for media storage, and preparing it for Docker-based media and sync services.

🧰 Prerequisites

Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB recommended for media tasks)
microSD card (32GB or larger) for boot
USB 3.0 SSD or NVMe via USB adapter (for media storage)
Stable 5V 5A USB-C power supply
Ethernet connection (recommended for NAS)
Another PC for flashing the OS

1️⃣ Install Raspberry Pi OS (Lite Recommended)

Download Raspberry Pi Imager:
https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/
Select:

Raspberry Pi 5 → Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit)
(Lite is preferred for servers; no desktop environment needed)

Before writing, press the gear icon:

Enable SSH
Set username and password
Configure Wi-Fi (if not using Ethernet)
Set hostname (e.g., rpi-nas)

2️⃣ Initial Configuration

SSH into the Pi:

ssh pi@<raspberrypi-ip>

Update the OS:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo reboot

3️⃣ Install OpenMediaVault

Download and run the official OMV install script:

wget -O - https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/installScript/raw/master/install | sudo bash

After the script finishes:

Access OMV web UI:

http://<raspberrypi-ip>/

Default credentials:
- User: admin
- Password: openmediavault

Immediately change the password in the Web UI.

4️⃣ Connect and Mount Your SSD

Plug in the SSD (USB 3.0 recommended)
In OMV web UI:

Go to Storage → Disks
Verify your SSD is listed

Wipe the SSD (if new or safe to erase):

Storage → Disks → Wipe → Quick

Create a Filesystem:

Storage → File Systems → Create → EXT4
Mount the filesystem (OMV will mount it under /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-xxxx)

5️⃣ Create Shared Folders

For media and sync services:

Access Rights Management → Shared Folders → Add

Example folders:
- music
- videos
- photos
- appdata (for Docker persistent configs)

Set Permissions:

Set Owner: root
Group: users
Permissions: 775 with setgid if you want all new files to inherit the users group.

6️⃣ Enable SMB/NFS for Network Access (Optional)

Services → SMB/CIFS → Enable

Add shared folders as SMB shares for easy access from Windows/Mac.

(Optional) Enable NFS for Linux clients.

7️⃣ Install OMV-Extras and Docker

OMV-Extras (gives Docker and Portainer support):

wget -O - https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/packages/raw/master/install | sudo bash

In the OMV web UI:

Go to System → OMV-Extras
Install Docker
Install Portainer for container management. Services → Compose → Files and Click the plus button

services:
  portainer:
    image: portainer/portainer-ce:latest
    container_name: portainer
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "9000:9000"
      - "8000:8000"
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
      - portainer_data:/data

volumes:
  portainer_data:

8️⃣ Map Docker Volumes to SSD

When creating containers (Syncthing, Jellyfin, etc.) in Portainer:

Map host folders from your mounted SSD, for example:

Service	Host Path	Container Path
Syncthing	/srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-xxxx/music	/sync/music
Jellyfin	/srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-xxxx/music and /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-xxxx/videos	/media/music & /media/videos
App Configs	/srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-xxxx/appdata/<service>	/config

9️⃣ Setup Syncthing for Phone → NAS Sync

Deploy Syncthing via Docker:
- Map /music and /photos to container paths
- Use PUID=1000 and PGID=1000 for permission consistency
Pair devices using Syncthing-Fork on Android
Set Send-Only (Phone) → Receive-Only (NAS) for one-way sync

services:
  syncthing:
    image: syncthing/syncthing:latest
    container_name: syncthing
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "8384:8384"     # Web UI
      - "22000:22000"   # Sync traffic
      - "21027:21027/udp"  # Discovery
    volumes:
      - /srv/path-to-your-disk/syncthing/config:/var/syncthing
      - /srv/path-to-your-disk/syncthing/data:/mnt/sync

🔟 Setup Jellyfin for Media Playback

See my media-management blog post for a complete setup guide.

Deploy Jellyfin via Docker
Map /music and /videos folders to /media/music and /media/videos
Add libraries in the Jellyfin dashboard

1️⃣1️⃣ Enable Secure Remote Access with Tailscale (Optional)

Install Tailscale:

curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh
sudo tailscale up

http://<device-name>.tailnet.ts.net

✅ Final Notes

Always use EXT4 for SSDs to avoid Linux permission issues
Set proper permissions (775 with group users) for all media folders
Keep your Pi cool if transcoding with Jellyfin
Regularly backup /srv/dev-disk-by-uuid-xxxx/appdata for Docker configs

The Journey#

🔧 What You’ll Need:#

🪛 Step-by-Step Setup#

Accessing the NAS#

NOTE#

🖥️ Raspberry Pi 5 NAS Setup with OpenMediaVault and External SSD#

🧰 Prerequisites#

1️⃣ Install Raspberry Pi OS (Lite Recommended)#

2️⃣ Initial Configuration#

3️⃣ Install OpenMediaVault#

4️⃣ Connect and Mount Your SSD#

5️⃣ Create Shared Folders#

6️⃣ Enable SMB/NFS for Network Access (Optional)#

7️⃣ Install OMV-Extras and Docker#

8️⃣ Map Docker Volumes to SSD#

9️⃣ Setup Syncthing for Phone → NAS Sync#

🔟 Setup Jellyfin for Media Playback#

1️⃣1️⃣ Enable Secure Remote Access with Tailscale (Optional)#

✅ Final Notes#