My media resides on windows home server2011 in a 4U 24 drive server case. Due to that OS My Plex server is currently running on a Windows 7 HTPC and to populate my library I must “Map” those networked drives.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that is only going to work so far before there are no letters left since PLEX can only see drives on the local machine and PLEX will not run on WHS2011.
Am I missing something or is there another way to present networked shares to PLEX residing on a different machine.
It doesn’t mention Windows 7 or Windows Home Server 2011, but I have a Windows 7 machine and started following the steps and was able to see where it said to mount to an empty folder.
That will get you passed the alphabetical limit if it works (and it should).
Mounting the drives in empty NTFS folders is how I share them over my network but those " shared folders" are not visible to PLEX on Windows 7 unless I “Map network drive” and assign it a letter.
I need to try to map a higher level folder with the individual drives’ shared folders inside it. I just do not know if PLEX can drill down through such a structure to see the required individual media folders.
Employing the above method will disable a safeguard in Plex, which normally prevents loss of metadata if one or several of the mounted drives are for some reason temporarily unavailable.
If you use this method, you should never, ever activate “Empty trash automatically after every scan” in Plex.
I recommend using either UNC paths or a software like Stablebit Drivepool
How do you add UNC paths to a PLEX media directory when it only shows drive letters and no provision to explore elsewhere.
I use the above method because it’s been the best way to maintain my media server that’s been in operation over a decade. In that time we’ve gone through several generations of HDD upgrades and as should be expected I’ve needed to replace several failed drives so “temporarily unavailable” is a given.
I started out with bsd and linux using various flavors of RAID before I settled on WHS2011 safeguarding the media by backing up each server drive on a removable NTFS drive that will work on any windows machine and I can easily pop back in to restore.
