I am not very savvy with computers, tech and how they connect, so forgive my ignorance, but I am having trouble setting up my Plex server.
I have all my music on a Seagate External Hard drive .
I have installed Plex on the hard drive, and loaded music to Plex .
I want to be able to access this from my smart phone. (App is installed)
I am able to access this drive via plex App on my smart phone, while my computer is on and the drive is physically connected to it, but I’d rather not have my laptop on 24/7.
I’d like to connect the external hard drive to the router via USB instead of my laptop. When I connect the hard drive to the router via USB, the app is not finding the drive.
Is this possible or does the drive need to be a NAS? I’m assuming NAS is not just a ‘passive’ storage device.
It’s not as simple as that.
While you can easily connect a drive to a router with such connectors (e.g. USB), that will not provide any particular functionality – it’s a HDD connected to a router, so depending on what the router will do with it, it’ll most likely be nothing more than providing the files within your home network.
If you want to make Plex available in your network in an always-on mode, you need a platform that can actually run your server. The router on its own is very unlikely to be able to run the executables you installed from your Windows(?) laptop.
There’s some Netgear routers on which you can run a Plex Media Server (server app running on the Router). Another alternative is to use a NAS… by name this is “network attached storage”. However they have a built-in mini computer / operating system that will let you manage how your storage is made available and can run applications (e.g. a Plex Media Server) – so it’s not entirely a passive storage device.
NAS are a good solution if your Plex client apps can play your files as they are or with minimum transcoding (as most NAS are relatively low-powered)
An external hard drive is not a NAS.
There are a few NAS devices onto which you can install Plex Server.
(Currently, you have Plex installed on your Windows Computer, btw.)
Thanks for the help. So if I’m reading this right, when plex talks about being able to use a hard drive, it’s referring to storage but it still needs to be connected to some sort of ‘brain’ in order to work.
The Plex Media Server is that “brain” and it needs to be running on some platform. Your media / server files being on a disk are just passively lying around… no server running.
