Can I join the club? I have been fighting this one too. It is driving me nuts.
I solved this problem for the Olympic, I have the pro 2017 model, external HDD been disconecting randomly no matter what I tried, gave up and move the external HDD with my media library to the rooter and use internal HDD for recording.
However for the Olympic I was afraid of maxing out the internal storage since I am recording it all. So I plugged in a external HDD again, and it failled after a few hours again. I have a micro USB cable plugged in for recharging the controller, I unplugged it. The external HDD been working without a glitch since. I think the problem for me was USB interference.
Hope this help.
I can’t believe that there’s still no acknowledgement from Nvidia or Plex regarding this issue. I can only record one or two shows before my external drive shows as empty, requiring a restart to get it working again.
I recently cut the cord and I was hoping that an Nvidia Shield/HDHomerun/Plex combo would be a good solution for recording local stations… The boss, however, is quickly losing patience with this little experiment of mine after losing the majority of her recordings. I guess I should have gone with something a little more reliable (Tablo or TiVo).
Sounds like your drive is not waking up from standby. Which is usually a setting on the enclosure.
Found this thread over on the Nvidia/GeForce forums. Looking specifically at post #34 by “venom121212”, it sounds like it may be filesystem permission issues based on where you have your Plex media libraries stored on the drive. I have not personally been able to test this out on my own system as I am not currently living in the same place where my Nvidia shield is set up, but it may be worth a shot. Here’s the link:
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/1036787/shield-tv/usb-hard-drive-becomes-unavailable-within-a-day/post/5304498/#5304498
TLDR:
file system permissions may be the cause if you are storing your media libraries in any directories other than the ones automatically created by the Android OS whenever you plug in an external usb drive to the system:
LOCATION*/Android/data/com.plexapp.mediaserver.smb/movies
(*Where LOCATION is your external usb hard drive)
Due to restrictions in native Android OS regarding read/write permissions to external devices, the theory is that trying to read/write to directories outside that listed above may be causing the issue. I will certainly be trying this out the next chance I get on my own system but thought I’d share here in case anyone is interested in trying it out.
I too have this problem with a Samsung thumb drive. Agree it seems to be particularly triggered when there’s a lot of writes happening (possibly especially if the writes are non-sequential). Given some people’s experience with it breaking less if you put a powered USB hub in the loop I wonder if maybe the ports are not providing quite as much power to the drive as they’re supposed to.
I bought a powered USB hub to put in the middle (this one: https://amzn.to/2M9zDrq ), and it does indeed seem to fix the problem. I did enough random writes that would previously have caused it to die about four times, and it didn’t die yet.
