Software Support
In this area, you won’t have any trouble finding images, unlike ARM-based boards. Since this hardware is based on the Intel x86 architecture, you can run almost any popular operating system, such as Windows, Ubuntu, and so forth. That said, by default, the device comes pre-installed with OpenMediaVault, which is a free user-friendly, open-source network-attached storage (NAS) operating system built on Debian Linux. If you’re seeking a more modern NAS solution with an improved GUI experience and a wealth of features, consider installing other free NAS options like TrueNAS or CasaOS.
On a positive note, OpenMediaVault is super easy to set up, making it an excellent choice for beginners who want to create a home/office NAS for data backup. It also includes some impressive features, such as a built-in firewall, which is essential for most users.
OpenMediaVault (Screenshots)
Setting everything up (configuring and mounting our 1TB NVMe)
The first step is to set a new admin password for OpenMediaVault. Once this is done, you will need to choose a preferred file system for the NVMe card (we selected ext4) that was pre-installed in the device. The final steps include enabling the “SMB/CIFS” service, creating a user, assigning the NVMe device to that user while configuring file permissions, and finally enabling the NFS option.
With everything configured, you can map the device as a network drive from any Windows computer that is connected to the same local network by using our NAS gateway IP address. In our example, we have assigned the NVMe device name as NetDisk_NVMe1.
Setting up our storage for network mapping under Windows 11 OS
Throughput test
We also measured the average data transfer speed when transferring data from one location to another over our local network within a specified time frame. Our setup was simple: the NestDisk device was connected to the RJ45 port of our Banana Pi R3 router using a standard Cat 6 cable (shown in the infographic below). After establishing the connection, we tested the transfer speed of a 21.2 GB video file from our Windows desktop PC to our 1 TB NestDisk storage.
Results
According to our simple test, the average transfer speed for this test file was around 113 Mb/s, and it took approximately 3 minutes to completely copy the file to our NestDisk device.
