Yes it will work, just use Plex or Kodi to connect and play media.
Ok, got some good input. I'm gonna try again tonight.
The Motivation: I had my HTPC/Gaming computer as the same machine. And when my wife wants to watch tv during the day she needed to power on the whole rig. (3770k OC'd and 980Ti + 9 HDD's) This was generating too much heat, and putting unnessecary mileage on my gaming rig.
I have a ton of Movies and TV, that I want to keep available (about 15TB) and 1 or 2 external drives weren't gonna do it. And a proper NAS solution is maybe too much at this point. So enter the 4-bay HDD.
I'm gonna try and make this work, I'll update with results and steps I take later.
Don't buy it. That thing is a piece of junk. I bought one a couple years ago to make a budget NAS and the fucking thing kept on unmounting the disks. I retuned it the same week I bought it.
Get a real NAS instead. I picked up a 4 bay synology and it's fantastic.
Besides , if you're planning on using this for plex server on the shield, remember that the Plex movie art and meta data are always saved to the internal storage. Even if you merge external storage with it, plex cannot use it for metadata. This will be a problem for those with massive (multi-terabyte) libraries of content and have the 16gb shield (not the pro 500 GB)
I'm going to use an Odroid XU4 to be the host of my external drives using OpenMediaVault. I may buy one of these in the near future if a sale on internal drives pop up that I can't pass up. But for now, all of my media is stored on two external drives.
How did I get media onto those drives while it is connected to the a Shield TV?
Yeah! It definitely works with this HDD Hub AND NTFS! I have almost the same HDD hub (different manufacturer, same design & hardware) and it's working great with my shield tv. I've got 4 HDD's inside it (all NTFS) and every single one of them gets recognized and works with Kodi.
The only problem with NTFS on the Shield is that you don't really get write access!!!I had to root my shield and install a FTP-Background-Server App so I could copy Media from my PC over the Network to the HDD-Hub. Any App can write on the internal HDD of the Shield but only Apps with root access can write on a NTFS HDD connected via USB.
I hope this helps.
Edit: Another example of writing files on HDD: Kodi doesn't ask for root access and thats why I cant download subtitles to the movie files on the HDD. I had to create a folder on the internal HDD of the shield. Kodi can write to this directory without root-access. So you definitely want to have root and a ftp server app if you want to manage your files over the network ;)