Man, sometimes you just get an idea stuck in your head, right? For me, it was around late 2015, early 2016. My digital life was a total mess. Pictures of the kids scattered across a dozen old phones and external drives, movies I owned ripped from DVDs sitting on a dusty hard drive in the closet, and trying to watch anything on the TV meant plugging in a laptop or swapping USB sticks. It was driving me nuts. I just wanted one place for all our family’s stuff, accessible from anywhere in the house, maybe even when we were out.
My first thought, like most folks, was to just buy one of those fancy network storage boxes, a NAS, you know? I looked them up online, saw the prices, and my wallet just shriveled up. Way too much for what I thought was a simple problem. So, I figured, “Hey, I’m pretty handy with computers, I can build one myself!” That’s where the journey really kicked off.
I started digging around, asking some tech-savvy buddies what they did. A few mentioned these little Raspberry Pi computers. Seemed cheap enough, so I snagged one, a Pi 3 B+, I think it was. Along with that, I grabbed a couple of old external hard drives I had lying around, thinking I’d just plug them in and magic would happen. Oh, boy, was I naive.
The first hurdle was the operating system. I just grabbed the default Raspbian, thinking it’d be fine. Setting it up on the tiny SD card was a bit fiddly, but I got there. Then came connecting the drives. Power was an issue right off the bat. The Pi couldn’t power two spinning hard drives reliably through its USB ports. They kept disconnecting, flashing lights, making sad noises. I learned real quick that I needed a powered USB hub. Another trip to the electronics store.
Once I had the hub, the drives stayed connected. Great! Now, how to make them talk to each other and share files over the network? I watched some YouTube videos about setting up something called Samba. Sounded easy enough. Typed a bunch of commands into the terminal, copied some configuration files. And boom! It worked… sort of. I could see the folders from my main desktop, but transfers were agonizingly slow. Like, really, really slow. Moving a single movie took forever. Streaming it was out of the question; it would just buffer and freeze every five seconds.
That sent me back to the drawing board. I thought maybe it was the Pi itself, too weak. Or maybe the cheap old hard drives. I spent weeks messing with different file systems, trying to optimize network settings, reading endless forum posts about optimizing a Pi for network speed. Nothing seemed to really make a dent. I almost gave up at that point, thinking I just wasn’t smart enough for this kind of thing.
Then, a buddy of mine, bless his heart, told me about an old desktop PC he was tossing. It was like six, seven years old, but still had a decent processor and a couple of hard drive bays. He said, “Just take it, it’s just gathering dust.” I figured, why not? More power, more flexibility. I hauled it home, wiped the old Windows install, and decided to try something different. I had heard about these specific operating systems made for NAS systems. I landed on something called FreeNAS, I think it was called back then, or maybe it was TrueNAS Core now. It was complicated, let me tell you.
Installing it was a whole new beast. It needed a separate USB stick or small drive just for the OS, and it was pretty particular about the hardware. I spent an entire weekend just getting it to boot properly. Then came setting up ZFS, which sounded like some kind of ancient alien language. Pools, vdevs, datasets… my head was spinning. But I kept pushing through, watching more tutorials, reading articles late into the night. The good thing was, once I finally wrapped my head around it, ZFS offered awesome data integrity features, which was a huge relief for precious family photos.
After getting the storage set up, the next step was getting the media to stream nicely. I found out about Plex. Now, this was a game changer. Installing Plex Media Server on my new “Franken-NAS” box was pretty straightforward once the underlying OS was solid. It scanned all my movies and TV shows, grabbed artwork and descriptions, and suddenly my collection looked professional. Streaming to all our devices – phones, tablets, smart TVs – worked flawlessly. No more buffering, no more slow transfers. It was like magic, but the kind of magic you had to fight for tooth and nail.
Over the next few months, I kept tweaking it. Added more hard drives, set up automated backups to a cloud service for critical stuff, even dabbled with Docker to run a few other services on it. Every time I hit a snag, it felt like a wall, but every time I figured it out, even with a crude solution, it felt like climbing a mountain. I learned so much about Linux, networking, file systems, and hardware compatibility. It wasn’t just about getting a media server running; it was about understanding how all these pieces fit together. That old clunky desktop, sitting in the corner of my office, humming away, became a silent testament to a journey of pure stubbornness and a lot of learning. It still powers our family’s digital world today, years later. And you know what? It’s rock solid.
