Hi. After a couple of recent ‘scares’ with my NAS which houses all my media I’m about to buy a USB external desktop drive and copy the more difficult to re-acquire files onto that. The idea being that in future the NAS would continue to act as the download destination but the new USB drive would be the main source for media to the Vero 4K. So, a few questions - Would I need to, or is there any benefit in, mounting the usb drive in a similar way to the NAS ( I followed the excellent guide; ‘‘configuring-fstab-based-nfs-share-mounts’’). Would USB given similar performance for the larger 4K files (considering it’s a 4K rather than a 4K+). Would I still get all the benefits of the Library system? And finally I was hoping to use the internal File Manager to move stuff across but would the duplication (both the NAS and USB drives with the same media and connected at the same time) cause problems. Sorry for the long winded questions but after digging around for the last few days I either haven’t found answers or they were beyond my understanding!
It sounds like you may be over complicating it in your head a bit. A directly attached USB drive, unless the drive itself is the bottleneck, should have over double the bandwidth of the 4K’s 100mb ethernet connection. A USB connected drive will always be mounted at a system level so using fstab to configure it only changes where it is mounted, not the performance.
As for your library that can continue as you currently have it as long as you are smart about how you do the switch. If you currently have your library entries pointed to a system mount then you should be able to just modify that so the new directly attached drive is mounted such that the file paths would still be the same. For example if your pointed such that Kodi sees /mnt/nas/movies/some_movie/some_movie.mkv then you will need to make it so that exact file path is still valid so “nas” would need to stay as the mount folder and the file naming and organization would have to be emulated as well.
Alternatively you can use path substitution to redirect from the old location to the new one. With this method you would be telling Kodi that (using the example file path above) when it sees /mnt/nas/ redirect to /media/usb/ and it will manipulate the file paths on the fly in the background. I wrote a how-to about how that works that can be found here…
The main thing you absolutely do not want to do here is edit your existing sources in Kodi. This will lead to duplication of items in your library, dead links, and is a pain to fix without just deleting your entire library and starting over.
Brilliant, thank you so much for this.