My Home Network

Go to any IT or AV forum, you will find topics that are related to home network, for simply file sharing or multimedia streaming to every corner in the house, or even a more complicated ones. For my objectives, a simple one will do.

Anyway, the objectives of the setup are:

1. Have a central data storage or home server;
2. Media streaming to ground floor and 1st floor living room;
3. Media streaming to home theatre;
4. Media streaming to master bedroom;
5. And, Internet access from all the location mentioned above.

I never really look into a central storage before and thus all my data files are spread across my PC, laptop, and several external hard drives. All without a central network. It can become frustrated and tedious sometimes when you need to access a file and only realized that it’s stored somewhere else. Besides, it won’t be more troublesome when my fiancée wants to browse through some stock pictures from business supplier while I’m in the middle kicking some monster ass.

So, to make things simple and for me to have an uninterrupted-entertainment session in the future, I bought a network attached storage (NAS) at a local IT shop couple of weeks ago. It’s a D-Link DNS-323, not the top end product but able to server me my requirement. This little thing can do more than just storing files. Product review is available here, or you might want to check out the official site. I asked for a NAS product few years back in CPS, and it cost around RM1K that time. I will see how this thing goes 1st, and later I will try out the Windows Home Server.

Anyway, since I’m the one who will do the download and movie/music ripping, this device will be sitting in my home office connecting to the home network via my Belkin N+ modem router. So in order to play the media stored in this device from other location in the house, I guess the best way is to stream to the HTPC in every location mentioned above. That way, not only I can enjoy movie/music, I can even go online with the HTPC. Why make myself only able to surf the web in the office, right?

Ok, time to copy all my media files to the device now. Not really a lot at the moment, but for sure it’s not going to be a few minutes job.

Until then…..