I just bought an Nvidia Shield TV (16GB model) to replace the sluggish UI of my Samsung 4K TV, to get Android TV and to replace my SteamLink.
I just found out that I can actually use the Shield TV as a media server - which would be epic as it means I wouldn’t have to keep my PC on for media consumption (imagine an overclocked 8-core and RTX 2080Ti SLI rig running 24/7 and what that does to the power bill). I read the Nvidia and Plex support/news pages and whatnot - sounds great to me! But one thing was not clear to me - does this only properly work on the “Pro” model with the internal 500GB HDD or can I use my 16GB model and have, say, 6TB HDD attached to it via USB?
Ideally I’d like to use the Shield TV as my “hub” for the TV space now and have it serve music and videos locally (LAN) and externally (at work) without having my PC on anymore.
I have a 128GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive connected to my Shield 16GB. It is used as a Backup Plex Media Server, my primary is still my Windows 10 PC. I also use network storage, Apple Time Capsule with 2GB HDD, as an alternate storage location for the Shield. My Shield is primarily for any cases in which my Primary fails for any recording. I routinely deleted recordings from the Shield Flash Drive to ensure that it does not fill up. I would suggest possibly turning off the Empty Trash Automatically option under the Server/Library Settings. This is mainly for any cases in which the external drive is not available, perhaps drive spun down and isn’t immediately accessible. If the Empty Trash option is selected you might see cases in which Plex removes the shows/movies from it’s database and later adds them back when the drive is available again.
Hi, thanks for the reply! I’m not entirely sure this answered my question, as you derailed into backups and whatnot, whereas I was more interested in whether I can dump terabytes worth of my videos and vinyl audio rips onto a HDD and use that with the Shield TV as a server, as opposed to my PC.
My guess is “yes”, but I’d love a confirmation from someone who is doing it successfully.
Make sure to follow the links to the other related articles. Of particular importance is that part of the Plex data can only be stored on ‘internal storage’, of which you only have 16GB and will become problematic if it fills up. Ditto for transcoding. You may be able to get around this by adding a MicroSD card as adoptable storage. YMMV tho’, because of write speeds etc.
PLEX has released the ability to migrate SHIELD server data to external storage. This allows 16GB SHIELD owners the ability to serve large PLEX libraries without impacting local storage.
Make sure your PLEX app and PLEX Media Server app have been updated to the latest version available on the Google Play Store
Migrating your PLEX Server storage location
Connect your USB storage device to SHIELD (SHIELD 2015 owners may also use the SD Card)
a. (Optional) Adopt your storage to SHIELD
Open PLEX on your SHIELD and go to Settings → PLEX Media Server → Storage location
Select the storage location
a. Adopted storage: Select Internal (user accessible location)
b. Removable storage: Select the storage device
I’ve ended up using an 8TB drive that I did not “adopt”, just plugged in and left as external.
I placed all my files into the “NVIDIA_SHIELD” folder, since that one can be accessed and modified via SMB when mapped as a network drive on my PC.
Two things I need to fix:
Transfer speeds are not up to scratch - fluctuating between a few MB/s to 40-ish MB/s - pretty crap, considering everything is USB3 and gigabit. Maybe my cables need re-examining.
A couple of TV shows/cartoons don’t download metadata no matter what I do… I never had this problem running the server on my PC. Will probably post this as a separate issue.
In the black friday i bought a 2.5, 3.0 usb 4 tb seagate expansion connected and plex is saying that the seagate expansion + portable 4 tb is slow, but its a usb 3, and a film with 25 gb has some stuttering, but not on mrmc runing the plex server.
