I am trying to work out how to use my external hard drive with an Android TV, and I don't really want to risk loosing all the data that is on it by doing something stupid.
I am planning on plugging the external hard drive into Kodi (on a Mi Box), and then watching the files from it. However, I want to be able to unplug the hard drive, and copy files to and from it aswell free of will.
Is this going to work with it as it currently is, or does Android TV have to format it before it can be used?
From my experience with my nVidia Shield TV Pro, you should he good to go with an external drive used exactly as you mentioned.
For big files you may want to connect it right to the mi box without a USB hub as personally I saw the video lag on some stuff when it went through a hub with a keyboard and mouse also connected.
I connected a USB thumb drive to my mi box yesterday and formatted it to internal storage and it never worked since. The system never recognized it as internal storage. My brand new Samsung USB 3.0 thumb drive got ruined. My computer can't read it anymore and i tried formatting it and it would only read it as 16mb of storage. I'm getting a new 64 gb thumb drive and won't make that mistake again. My main use for it will be to load roms for emulation. I grabbed an old 8gb thumb drive and left it the way it was from the computer and it worked fine.
Android will put a folder on the drive, but that's all. Inside that folder, sub-folders for apps that you run will be created, and apps can only write to those folders. Apps can read the whole drive, but they cannot delete, modify, or write to any other place on the drive. The only exception to this is file manager apps, which should ask for specific permission to write in those areas when you go to install.
I'm not sure about the Mi Box (I'm to lazy to look, sorry), but I'm willing to bet that it will read NTFS (slowly, as it's probably using the open source driver), exfat, fat32, and maybe some others. I know the Shield will read HFS+, but that might just be extra support that Nvidia put in there.
check out this link https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-open-disk-management-2626080
Find your drive right click on each and delete both partitions and them make a new volume. For some reason the Mi Box made the primary partition 16mb and the OS cant see the rest of it. The drive is not ruined though.
I would recommend not using the USB as internal storage feature until the update to 7.0. It's just too iffy on this box right now.
One time you format it to internal it seems to work fine but 6.0 does not actually transfer data to the external drive. It will actually show the data as being in both places. You won't actually be freeing up space on the internal drive.
The next time you try formatting to internal it messes up the partitions on the drive and you have to get a partition manager to fix the drive.
These issues don't exist on the Nexus Player. So it's a combination of still being on Marshmallow and something the OEM has done to the USB portion.
I just plug in my external to my shield tv. I think I use it as external storage, not internal. I can freely watching media from it using kodi and I can easily disconnect it, plug it into my computer to move more files onto it, and plug it right back into the shield. I don't recall doing any sort of formatting at all on it. It's the same for any flash drives I've plugged into it.
I found "format as internal storage" didn't really work well, because I couldn't figure out how to transfer my video files to the drive correctly. It also automatically installed apps to that location first, which isn't ideal.
I formatted an old 32GB flash drive I had lying around as FAT32 and put my videos on there. From there, as long as I didn't mount the drive in a file explorer program, VLC saw my video files on the flash drive.
For some reason, if you mount the usb drive in a file explorer program, the rest of the OS doesn't see it any more, until you unplug it and plug it back in.