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content from the internet is fantastic today's higher internet speeds mean that
you can watch or listen to nearly anything you want from almost anywhere
you want i mean 30 years ago it was practically unthinkable to watch an
indian cricket match from the northern reaches of canada and yet here we are
but even though streaming services like spotify netflix and youtube have totally
changed the way that we consume media that doesn't mean that there aren't
still major advantages to keeping your own copies of the music movies shows and
podcasts that you enjoy and one of the best ways to do this is with a home
media server so seagate reached out to sponsor a video about how to set one up
having a server that you own as a central hub for your media not only
prevents you from being at the mercy of a slow or finicky internet connection it
also avoids the folks that run these streaming services removing something
you've been wanting to check out without warning and since a local network can
frequently move data at speeds that are much faster than your average internet
connection even wirelessly you won't have to compromise on visual quality or
worry about buffering even if you're watching 4k videos with full blu-ray
quality or you have a lot of users on your network at once
this setup can also help you avoid storing individual copies of everything
on each of your devices hogging up a ton of space over and over
so how should you get started then well another upside to having a home media
server is that you don't need a fully blown pc to house this data while you
can repurpose an old computer as a server if you'd like i actually did a
video about that very thing on our other channel a more elegant solution is to
use a home network attached storage device or a nas these are bare bones pc
like devices that are dedicated solely to delivering files as fast as possible
a typical nas usually includes its own lightweight operating system and easily
accessible drive bays so that you can add more hard drives as your content
library grows some compact desktop units can support
nearly a hundred terabytes of raw storage today
bear in mind of course that if you're using raid or a similar scheme to
protect against a disk failure some of that space will be consumed by
redundancy you can learn more about raid here
now many nas units ship without pre-installed storage so you can
actually choose your own configuration depending on your budget
some special use cases might benefit from solid state drives to cache your
data or hold virtual machines but for
file and media streaming duty on a gigabit network which is what you're
probably running hard drives are more than fast enough
if you're in a pinch typical desktop drives will serve you just fine though
for a little more money you can get nas optimized hard drives that are normally
more power efficient and that are designed for always on operation in
close proximity to other spinning drives
another thing you'll need for your nas is a good enough CPU if you want it to
handle transcoding your media to different formats for seamless operation
with all of your devices like your pc television smartphone or tablet and this
requires more processing power than a small
ARM CPU can handle a reasonably modern
quad-core desktop CPU should suffice for this but you might be able to get away
with a dual core if you're not running too many streams at once
the lack of CPU power is actually one of the reasons that many folks decide not
to simply plug an external hard drive into their home wireless router many of
those do have file server functionality built in and this netgear one even
supports plex a popular tool for managing and streaming media
but most of them will suffer from one bottleneck or another so let's say
you're going for the cadillac experience of a standalone nas plugged into your
router and you've just turned it on they all set up a little differently so the
manufacturer website is the place to start or if you're running something diy
then the project website for something like unraid or a free os like freenas
will have plenty of community getting started guides
once your nas is visible on the network your next step is to fill it up with
your favorite content this usually means transferring files over the network but
if your collection is as disorganized as ours was when we upgraded
many of them also support plugging external media in directly
but you don't want to just dump your files onto it willy nilly instead make
sure to organize your media into a folder structure that breaks your tv
episodes down by season for example or your songs by artist and album
popular media server software like plex will provide instructions online about
how best to do this speaking of plex your next step will be to download the
server software that you'd like to use through your nas itself or your web
browser and the client software for your devices
from the web or the appropriate app store this will allow you to easily
access your media kind of like your own personal netflix plex as we've mentioned
before is a very popular option although others such as kodi and ambi are also
fine choices configuration after this point is mostly a matter of following
the on-screen instructions and opening up some router ports for remote access
and then you're ready to enjoy your content from anywhere in the world
whatever that content might be
now if you're interested in setting up a private multimedia server then check out
seagate and synology the bar has been
raised officially with 12 terabyte capacity options in the seagate ironwolf
pro family and that is seagate's specialty nas drive it's built for nas
by working closely with leading nas vendors such as synology the result is a
drive that works perfectly even in enclosures with lots of drives stacked
right next to each other where heat and vibration can become a concern for
lesser drives and it's got iron wolf health built in which allows you to
easily monitor your drive through your nas os for peace of mind on top of that
they've got a five-year limited warranty and ironwolf pro includes two years of
data recover services that cover data corruption viruses user error and even
natural disasters such as fire and flood so build your own private cloud with
seagate and synology by checking out the links below
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