Laptop Windows 10
WD 5T Hard Drive connected directly to Netgear C7000 and identified as Readyshare
Installed Plex Server on the laptop
Copied the Plex Server software to USB hard drive and ran it (I think this didn’t do what I thought it would do as I’m now thinking it just installed it to the laptop again)
Updated libraries by pointing to WD folders and it works great
Shut down laptop thinking I had everything pointing at the hard drive but immediately lost access. Restarted laptop and I have access again.
I’m thinking I misunderstood the difference between a NAS and a USB Hard Drive. I thought that connecting the HD through readyshare would make it act like a NAS (literature through Netgear is a bit unclear) but now I’m thinking that Readyshare is just running it as a remote hard drive that I access through my laptop. In which case the laptop has to be running in order for me to access my Plex server.
I’m not thrilled about that cause I don’t like leaving it running all the time but not sure at this point what my option are other than buying a NAS server.
Any ideas on whether I have correctly identified the issue and what the options might be moving forward would be appreciated.
Any device wtih an i3 and above made in the last 5 years will be an excellent device. Many NAS’s only have Celerons N or J and struggle with lossless audio and subtitles.
Yeah, like Tiebierius says, the server needs a computer-like device to be able to run. NASs are popular things to do, which leaves your home computer able to shut down all you want.
Other options, are Raspberry pis. These small, cheap devices can feed up your media content just fine, but they are not very good at transcoding. So hopefully your media is in a format that is already supported by your players, otherwise you will have unacceptable buffering.
Unless you want to have your media accessible outside the house (like if you want to be able to watch on your iphone on the bus), or you plan to watch your media on more than 1 TV/device, it might be good to consider alternates. Kodi is a player that does not need a server to run. You can install Kodi on any android TV/device, and many others (Roku) as well. With this, you can install the HDD on your router as before, and access that from Kodi on your TV.
Thanks for the responses. Over Thanksgiving I was at a friends and we were watching a movie off my server (I left the laptop running). I told him about the problem and he happened to have a brand new, in the box, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Media Center Kit that he’d bought and never used. He gave it to me so now just have to figure out how to set it up and get it connected. Hopefully this’ll do it.
