Ever since I got my own computer and started watching movies, cartoons and anime, I’ve wanted to have a great collection, and back in the day the only way to do that was to save them on your computer hard drive and view them on that computer. Then I learned about the these really convenient little things called portable (external) HDDs, so I could store my media on that and then view it on a different device, and that worked great… at the time.

Its 2016, and I in this day and age, the cloud is all the rage and there are servers all over the place in the backend for every little app. So why can’t I have one? Well of course I can.

So I decided to improve my media library by upgrading the storage, setting up a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) and of course turning a bung of HDD into a full fledged server: NAS (Network-Attached Storage), which I called Accelerator. So a 1.something k$ later, I have the Synology 415+ and 18TB of storage I have a beautiful server sitting in my living room, which can be accessed from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.

Funny story, while on a highway in the middle of Malaysia, during my last adventure, I could easily download and access my music, anime or Russian TV shows from my iPhone. Thats what made me realise just how much our lives have changed with the development of the internet and smartphones.

I’ve set up my server with all the in built server features and set up all the users and permissions. The Synology DSM OS is very easy to use and has a lot of options for whatever you would like to configure.

But you might be asking: “How do you browse the media on the server? You can be just using the file system and playing it with a flash player on your browser?” And you are correct. There are amazing media server management programs out there, but the king of the all has to be PLEX.

Let me tell you about PLEX, and amazing features it has…. in my next blog post.