I have a nvidia shield pro with 16gb of storage, which runs plex server. I also have a NAS connected to the shield which is where all the media for the plex is located. Everything configured w/o any issues, last week, but now when I turn on the shield, I see a low disk space warning. I navigated to storage, on the shield, and I see that plex is using 10gb of local storage. I assume this is for all the metadata since all of the media files live on the NAS.
Is it possible to reconfigure the plex server to use something other than the internal 16gb of storage for metadata? I’m concerned that I’ll see an issue with performance if any more internal/onboard storage is used.
Alternatively, I noticed that my libraries have the option to play cinema trailers and that some tv shows play audio while I am in the screen where it lists the show details. I’m also curious to know which settings I can disable to get rid of those features. If some of the audio for the tv shows is being stored locally (the audio that plays while I’m browsing a particular tv show), that would also free up space that I don’t need.
If I make these changes, will plex delete those un-needed files or do I need to navigate to the library settings and delete the data (I am not local to plex, at this time, the delete buttons is red, I believe).
Three parts: Client Settings, Server Settings, Notes
Client Settings
Enabled/Disabled in individual client settings. Location varies based on client.
Plex Web: Settings → Plex Web → General. Uncheck Play Theme Music.
Android Mobile: Settings → Experience → Uncheck Play Theme Music.
I did not see any option to disable this globally at a server level (i.e. for all clients) or on a per-account level (like account settings for languages & subtitle choices).
Server Agents
If you disable the Plex Theme Music agent, Plex will not access theme music when TV show metadata is refreshed.
Server Settings → Agents → Shows, check/uncheck Plex Theme Music in TheTVDB and The Movie Database sections.
Notes
If you disable the agent and refresh TV show metadata, it does not delete existing theme music. Music will still play if enabled in the client. Plex will not pull theme music for any new shows, as the agent is disabled.
As a result, if you’ve Theme Music enabled at the client level and Server Agents disabled, you will still hear theme music for existing shows. You will not hear theme music for any new shows added to your server.
I’m not sure if that is intentional or a bug, but that’s how it works on my system.
The only way I know to remove existing theme music is to Plex Dance the entire TV show, as it completely removes the show & associated metadata from the Plex server before adding it back in.
Internal Storage : This option allows you to basically replace the internal storage and instead use the attached USB drive for installing apps. Choosing this option will format the drive and you will lose any existing data on it ! At that point, the drive can only be used with the NVIDIA SHIELD and will not be usable with other devices unless you format it again.
I plugged in a 1TB external drive and went to plex settings and tried to change the storage to external but my only options where the two internal options that I saw w/o the external plugged in. The external drive was set to be used as system storage and it was visible from the shield menu.
I did get a prompt to move data over to the new external drive (not a plex prompt) and initially I clicked no because I wanted to move the data to external storage via the plex setting referenced in the article I posted, but as stated above, the option wasn’t there. I also tried to reboot the NAS to see if that would restart plex and possibly have the drive appear, but it didn’t. I went back to the menu where the shield prompt stated it could move data to the external drive and I selected that option.
I wasn’t sure what was going on and why I wasn’t able to move the data over to the new drive, but I ended up deleting the 10gb of app data on the internal drive and of course next time I started plex, I was presented with the new plex server prompts. I have to re-attach the libraries and let it build everything back up, hopefully this time it does save it to the external storage drive.
This was a clean install and I only had the main user, I’m just annoyed that the ‘move’ didn’t happen properly. According to what I saw on the screen, it did seem as if it was moving data, but nothing really moved.
Very odd.
Edit- I am using the internal option for the external drive, this is why plex didn’t show a 3rd option, pasting this from the article that was posted " Internal Storage : This option allows you to basically replace the internal storage and instead use the attached USB drive for installing apps. Choosing this option will format the drive and you will lose any existing data on it ! At that point, the drive can only be used with the NVIDIA SHIELD and will not be usable with other devices unless you format it again."
With that being said, I think that I made the mistake of deleting the data from ‘internal’ storage because the external drive was being used as ‘internal’ which is why everything got wiped away when I deleted the 10gb of data that I thought was still being stored, locally.
Even if you move data to a removable drive there is a bug that keeps filling up internal storage with the cache folder contents which easily becomes gigabytes of data and is terrible for the internal flash of the shield which isn’t meant to be continually written to.
