After 2 years of running Plex on my old laptop, I’ve ordered the 16GB Shield yesterday to use as my primary Plex server going forward. Even though the laptop was old, it worked great as my only 2 clients in use were direct playing most files. Only rarely was my wife watching something in the bedroom while I was watching something in the living room - so there will not be a situation where more than 2 streams are being used. Currently, I have about 250 GB of media on the laptop (with about a 5 GB data folder). The bulk of my library is on a 2TB external hard drive. Once the Shield is setup - I plan to move the media from the laptop to the external drive and use it as the primary source with a total library size of nearly 1.5GB. (Once nearing the 2 TB mark, I’ll look at adding NAS storage - but that won’t happen until next year). Given that library size, I’m assuming I will need to immediately have the Plex database on external usb storage and will do so prior to adding the libraries.
The question is: The primary purpose of the Shield will be to run Plex. Although there will be occasional Netflix/Hulu use - not many other apps will be installed outside of my local news stations Google Store apps. No gaming is anticipated to be done (maybe some light gaming down the road). When considering where the Plex database should be setup: Is there any big performance issues with having it on the same external drive as the media? I assume it has to go under the ‘NVIDIA_SHIELD’ folder for writing purposes? Is it better to have a 2nd USB device plugged in solely for the database? And if so – is it better to have the 2nd device added as adopted storage? Removable? Doesn’t matter?
