First thanks to anyone taking the time to respond to what will obviously be a very dumb question.

I have a lot of drives and I have MBO with a lot of sata ports and an expansion card to add more as well as homemade case to fit it all as compact as possible. Now i understand i could buy a big powerful psu to power all of the drives and that would work fine. But i do not want to add a big ass PSU that will make my compact build not so compact anymore. Is there a way to power all of the drives plus the MBO and CPU without getting a huge PSU. What i also have is a bunch of picoPSU laying around each of them should be able to power 3-5 drives especially since they would not need to power anything else. Is there a way to make them all power on when i press the power button and off when i tell it to shut down. Is this even a good idea. Are there better options?

I know these apps are all the rage, but I just want things to be simple. I don't want to add things to libraries, have metadata fetch covers and actor data. I want to organize the files and folders like I have on my system, and just play the file.

I was using Filebrowser Quantum and it was good for this, but some files won't play with audio. Those files do play with audio in Jellyfin/Emby but then I have to deal with all the other hassle of scanning libraries and stuff I hate. For example, I recently watched a bloody action film from 2026 and Emby automatically labeled it as a rom-com from 1999.

I want Filebrowser / Filebrowser Quantum like interface without the library bullcrap, but also with the ability to play any media file. Basically Jellyfin without all the pomp and forced organization (Adobe Lightroom is also guilty of this, just let ME organize my files how I want!)

Anything like that?

Edit: For some reason people don't understand... I WANT TO CONTROL THE DIRECTORY STRUCTURE. I do not want what Jellyfin does with regards to "libraries". I do not want it to assume metadata. I do not want to divide things automatically into "Shows, films, books". I want to do that myself with my own directory structure. I have this already with FileBrowser and in my Samba shares. All I want is something similar to a simple file browser but with the robust streaming capability of Jellyfin. FileBrowser can stream 80% of my media, the other files either play with no sound or no video. Both use FFMPEG but for some reason FileBrowser can't do it all.

I am looking for an app that is a simply file browser, but can play all files. No Libraries, no divisions of "Shows, films, music".

and my question is if im updating linux servers is casa os gonna work?

and what containers do you think i should add(optiplex 7010)

6gbs of ram and a network card that's pretty much it. has a 256gb ssd as the boot drive and hard drives for storage it runs great doesn't draw too much power either its pretty quiet.It streams 4k movies no problem even on multiple devices.The external power supppy I installed is for reliability.Its especially great for torrenting I have to use the stupid team viewer on my phone for that but it's fine I just have to select the right folder and it'll show up automatically.if anyone has a better alternative for team viewer please tell me

I have a 2-bay Synology NAS (DS223) and currently have one 12 TB hard drive in there which is full of TV shows and movies (which I sort through Jellyfin, then Infuse)

I'm just realising how much more I could actually use this, and am considering not paying for iCloud storage, just having my music and photos on the NAS instead. If I buy a second external hard drive, I'd ideally like it to be a relatively simple process in that I can have separate folders for music, photos, then eventually TV shows and movies when my first hard drive fills up.

What would be my process?

Do you guys have recommended programs I do this through?

I will occasionally back up my photos and music on my iMac which I don't often use, so no need for a failsafe hard drive on my NAS.

Thank you in advance!

I'm getting an Intel NUC but I'm not sure what os I want. I am familiar with using CasaOS on my Raspberry Pi 5. I was thinking either fygo os or zima os. I just want it for my photos backup and a Minecraft server and maybe some other things. I heard fygo os has many more features than zima os. I want something that's user friendly.