Arguably the biggest flaw with the base model of the Nvidia Shield TV is that it only ships with 16GB of storage. That leaves room for apps and maybe a handful of games but unfortunately, not much else. To put things in perspective, Tomb Raider is one of the highlight titles for the Shield, but takes up a whopping 5.37GB of storage. That one game alone is nearly 33% of it’s storage! Luckily, you can expand it using one of Android’s most handy features, and a simple flash drive.
What is Adoptive Storage?
Google introduced a feature known as “adoptable storage” in Android 6.0, allowing users with devices that feature a microSD card slot to format those cards in a way that allows the operating system to treat them as the device’s internal storage. Although on the new Shield TV, this is done within the USB port and a USB flash drive.
What is the Best USB Flash Drive for Nvidia Shield?
Before we get into the step-by-step instructions, you should know what flash drives to look for when utilizing adoptable storage. Sure, while you can use any flash drive that connects over USB, the most important thing to consider when using adoptable storage is the speed of the memory you’re using because you want to keep the bottleneck as open as possible. A USB 3.0 flash drive is your best bet in terms of performance, capacity and value. Here are a few great recommendations:
How to Add Storage Space to Nvidia Shield TV Using Adoptable Storage?
- Plug in your USB drive to one of the USB ports on your Shield
- Reminder: All data on your drive will be lost during this process.
- Head into your Shield TV’s Settings
- Navigate to Storage & Reset
- Select the external storage, which will be listed by its name
- Select Erase and format as device storage
- Confirm Erase and then OK to start the formatting process
- Formatting could take several minutes depending on the size of the drive.
