First, despite the many complaints I see on this forum, I think the Plex eco-system is great and the best way for me to manage my home media. Thanks Plex people!
I currently have my Plex server running on a somewhat aging desktop under Windows. The connection is ok, and I don’t seem to suffer any lags when playing movies. I do have an issue maintaining a wifi connection as the desktop uses a wifi usb device to connect to the right network in my home.
That said, I am wondering if I can connect directly to my router and get a more stable connection, if not faster. I do understand I CAN connect it but it is more the Plex setup that concerns me. I think I would have to direct it to the router rather than the Windows location and in doing so I would need to re-scan all my media. And in the past I have found that I lose my ‘collections’ data and have to re-add all the collections from scratch.
Any thoughts on my logic here, and if I can preserve my Plex settings such as collections so all I have to do is redirect to the new location?
Many thanks in advance.
You plug in the LAN and that’s it
You can mount the network drive in Windows to a drive letter (or path) and point your libraries to that. I’ve seen other users directly pointing their libraries to the path of the drive (though I think that’ll come with its downsides).
Make sure to follow this guide in order not to start over with your library content.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/201154537-move-media-content-to-a-new-location/
Plugging the hard drive with your media into the router will not improve your situation.
The various Plex clients will NOT access the router to get the media. They will only talk to your server, which in turn will have to fetch the media files for them from the hard drive.
The right method to improvement is to hard-wire your server machine into the router.
Attach all hard drives with media directly to your server machine. Plugging them into other devices on the network will only add complexity to the setup and a host of additional error sources.
I am wondering if I can connect directly to my router and get a more stable connection, if not faster.
This depends on the router you have. For example, although my new mesh system is a definite upgrade from the old one in most ways including speed, I read a review that said the throughput through the router’s USB port is not great. Therefore I continue to connect networked storage from another computer on the LAN.
Based on what I am reading it may not be a good idea, so I will leave as is for now, Thanks for all the input.
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.