What can I say? I hoarde media.
I couldn't tell you why, but there's something satisfying in growing a collection. It's a psychological quirk of the species, and I am only human.
Fixing metadata of my eBook collection in Calibre and ensuring that I have each book series in its entirety is another example of a satisfying yet mostly pointless activity that I take part in. However, unlike eBooks, I can get through movies and TV shows much faster, making PleX a more 'active' activity, which is why I have added it here under my projects - it's an ongoing, growing effort.
Until recently, my collection was mostly DVDs and digital backups. It was after seeing a friend's dedicated media server that I greedily decided that I wanted one all of my own.

For some reason, I always manage to find the hardest way possible to do things, and so I purchased a refurbished Dell Optiplex from eBay, bought a bunch of harddrives, stripped the parts out of the Dell case, and wrestled them into a new case with some difficulty, thanks to a select few components being proprietary.

The case that I purchased did technically did have enough hard drive slots, but they weren't all of the correct size. I printed a bracket to reduce the third slot from 5.25" to 3.5", allowing me 3x 4TB HDDs. Plenty for now, although a mistake that I made was to use Windows to RAID the drives, and so upgrading will be a bit trickier than I had hoped. I shouldn't have let my impatience get to me, and instead of using Windows, gone straight to Linux. That's okay, it's working fine for now, and an upgrade is definitely a far future issue.

My current setup, snugly in a cupboard that the builder was kind enough to put a power point in. I am enjoying having this thing.
I have quite an ecclectic collection on the go, and am always open to new reccommendations. Please let me know of any of your must-haves that spring to mind.