Hello!
I really hope someone out there can help. I have tried searching all over and can not find any real answer to this problem.
I have a 1TB Western Digital USB 3.0 hard drive connected via USB to my Shield. I have all my programs set to record and things work fine up until I turn off my TV for the night and go to bed or leave the house for the day. It seems that over time the shield is putting the hard drive into sleep mode and is causing failed recordings. I have tried setting the settings to always on under the screen savers setting and I have also went into the web app and set the shield to scan for new shows every 15 minutes to try and keep it awake. Nothing seems to work. I am at a total loss of ideas here. Is this a problem with the Plex software? It works great when I am actively using the TV. Any ideas would be really helpful! Thank you!
When the hard drive is in that weird state, when you go into Shield settings/storage, do you see your hard drive there? What is the drive size displayed? 0 bytes?
@rouq said:
When the hard drive is in that weird state, when you go into Shield settings/storage, do you see your hard drive there? What is the drive size displayed? 0 bytes?
YES! It shows 0 bytes! Makes no sense! Do you know how to fix my problem???!
Well, that is a very well known issue. I battled this myself for a very long time. There are few threads talking about that in the nvidia shield section on this forum as well on the nvidia shield board forum. It seems to happen a lot more frequently when there is of lot write activities like OTA recording.
To my knowledge, there is no cure to that problem. From nvidia, it’s radio silence. They did not acknowledge this issue, they did not even mention it. On nvidia forum, some people said that this issue is caused by a rogue app call “ES File Explorer”. But I never installed this app. Also, an user says that it’s cause by plex because the did not implement the storage api properly. Personally, I have some difficulties believing that. Storage management is done at the OS level. If an app can screw up storage like that, then there is something very wrong with the OS itself. The OS should protects its storage.
I really like the nvidia Shield, it the best streaming box that I used. But its biggest (from my point of view) weakness is storage. I was so tired of this, losing recordings all the time because of this issue, having to unmount and remount the hard drive one or twice a day, so I bought a little WD my cloud personal nas at a local store to try out. I bought it from a local store because I wanted to try it and if it doesn’t work, I would return it. But this little guy never went back to the store. I installed it 3 months ago and I totally forgot about. I had a WD 6TB hard drive connected to my Shield, I unplugged it and plugged it on the WD my cloud so the same hard drive is accessible from the network. So far, the Shield never loose the connection with this NAS, I did not loose a recording because of storage since. This NAS is more than 2x faster to write to the hard drive compare to when the hard drive was connected directly to the Shield. I don’t have any data corruption anymore during transfer.
The only thing I can tell you is to drop the hard drive directly connected on the Shield and use a NAS. It’s not necessary to have 1k$ NAS. a little 140$ NAS do the job perfectly.
Ok. So. In the past I have had luck with using my router as a NAS (reading only). What I mean is using the USB plugs on my router and point the storage location to it. I suppose this would be the only way to probably do this. Now my thinking is, it IS wireless. I do have a VERY strong 5GHZ connection from my router to the shield. Do you think it would be feasible to try and record TV programs wireless thru my router to this HD using the USB plug on my router? What do you think? What would you do in my situation? I don;t have any real solution to getting a Ethernet cable to my shield unless I fish one down the wall. Which is possible but I don’t really want to do the work. What do you think?
Well, of coarse my recommendation is to use ethernet wired. But since you don’t have to spend any money to try out the wireless setup, you can start with a simple test. Plug you hard drive on your router and see if you can mount it on the Shield. If successful, try recording something and see how it goes. I guess it cannot be worst than what is going on with your hard drive directly connected on the Shield.
Of coarse, for recording, wireless is maybe not the best idea. If connecting your hard drive on your router works but you would like to have a wire connection, maybe you can use those little box using the electric wire to pass Ethernet. I never try those myself, but I read good thing about that.
I just tried using the 5g method and it seems to have enough bandwidth to record a show and stream a live broadcast on another channel at the same time. Time will tell if this works or not. One thing I do know is that this router (ASUS RT-AC68U) does not let the Hard drive sleep. So I will give it a day to see how it reacts. THank you for your input. Do you know if Nvidia and plex are working together to solve this dumb issue with the direct connect hard drive? I think this should have been pivotal before releasing it to plex pass subscribers. Call me crazy…wtf.
Nvidia and Plex never told anything about this issue. I sent like 3 feedbacks to nvidia through the Shield and I never got an answer back. They seems to totally ignore this, like it doesn’t exist. There are few issues like that don’t get any attention from nvidia. There is another issue I have that nvidia never said anything about it even there are several threads talking about it. The greenline at the bottom of some videos that is caused by the hardware acceleration decoding I see this with Plex, Amazon video, Netflix, Kodi. Anyway, that is another story.
I bought a Nvidia Shield 16GB along with a 128GB SanDisk Ultra Fit (SDCZ43-128G-GAM46) USB 3.0 flash drive, $26 on Amazon. I set the flash drive as device or internal storage, option provided when I added the flash drive to the Shield. I have had no issues with recording shows using Plex. I am not sure if you can set the external hard drive as device storage. I don’t believe I can remove the flash drive at this point since the Shield has written quite a few files/directories to it. Might try to take it out and put it in a computer to see if I can copy anything, recordings, off of it or if I will need to use a file explorer on the Shield to move recordings to network storage. I will unplug the Shield when I try this to ensure it does not try to power on while the flash drive is removed.
Did you adopt the flash drive? If you adopted your flash drive, then there is no point to plug it on your computer. It’s encrypted. The shield uses it as internal storage.
When you plug an external hard drive, you have the same choices either adopt the drive or mount it as external storage. Of course, I never adopted my hard drive because I have a shield pro and that would bypass my 500GB internal hard drive. However, when the drive is mounted as external storage, you can write only under the “NVIDIA_SHIELD” folder. So your plex libraries must be there if you want to record.
If you have a spare USB hard drive, you can keep your flash drive and mount the hard drive as external storage and try it.
I tried 3 differents hard drives, they all did that. Here are some threads talking about it:
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/982816/?comment=5131093
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/980648/?comment=5037629
Just want to say that the 5G connection to my router to the external USB 3.0 port seems to be working as intended. Some hiccups here and there but for the most part is has been working as intended. I would hope Nvidia and PLEX are at least recognizing some of these issues. The future of TV is on this platform for sure. Never again will I go back to the TRASH cable boxes.
