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, refurbprice 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 whole media hp
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 Nazz these are bare-bones
PC like devices that are dedicated
solely to delivering files as
fast as possible a typical mass usually
includes its own lightweight operating
system and easily accessible drive base
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 with
felt 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 Nazz
optimized hard drives that are normally
more power efficient and that are
designed for all these 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 us and alone as
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 on raid 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 on to 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 refurbished 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 Nass 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 Cody and MB 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 iron
wolf Pro family and that is Seagate's
specialty Nash drive it's built for Nass
by working closely with leading as
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 vibe
operation 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 iron wolf 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.
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