On the right, the external 2TB hard drive adopted as pseudo internal storage. On the left, the Shield’s Root showing storage > emulated. You can also mount remote drives on the Shield which will let you load them in PMS. Then and only then add media to your libraries.Install PMS from scratch and move it to the external drive (that pretends to be internal) before you load media to your libraries, otherwise it takes forever or outright fails.The sweet spot for best price/TB these days is with the 8TB WD Elements hard drive. I freed up an old 2TB Western Digital drive I had on my network. Hook up a USB hard drive to the Shield.What eventually brought sanity and stability to the whole thing was to: I also went through two Sandisk USB keys but the whole thing would always end up flaking out at some point. PMS works well on the Shield (though there have been some Shield-specific issues such as local assets not showing) but if you have a large library, you do NOT want to set it up on the feeble 16GB of internal storage, as you’ll fill that in a hurry with all the media metadata, even if you turn off video thumbnails in your libraries’ advanced settings. Shields come with Plex Media Server (PMS) pre-installed, so this is the option I went with.

In the past I went back and forth between running Plex and Emby on my PC, but I really wanted to move that task off my desktop which was one of the reasons why I bought the Shield in the first place. Use a USB Hard Drive so that Plex Can Scale As a Stable Media Server

Uninstall plex media server synology