How to add storage space to Nvidia Shield TV using adoptable storage

Ben Schoon | Jan 31 2017 - 10:41 am PT

The Nvidia Shield TV is a wonderful piece of hardware with a lot of strengths, but its biggest one is undoubtedly gaming. With Nvidia GameStream, GeForce Now streaming, and optimized Android titles, there’s no real limit on what the Shield can play ─ except for storage…

Arguably the biggest flaw with the base model Shield TV is that it only ships with 16GB of storage. That leaves room for apps and maybe a handful of games from Google Play, but not much else. To put things in perspective, Portal is one of the highlight titles for the Shield, but takes up a whopping 2.4GB of storage once downloaded. That one game alone is 15% of the Shield’s internal storage!

Apps like Netflix and Amazon Video on their own also take up fairly large amounts of storage, but luckily, you can expand it using one of Android’s most handy features, and a simple flash drive.

What is Adoptable Storage?

In Android Marshmallow, Google introduced a feature known as “adoptable storage,” allowing users with devices that feature microSD card slots to format those cards and have the OS treat them as the device’s internal storage. On the new Shield, though, things are limited to the USB port.

Picking the right flash drive

The most important thing to consider when using adoptable storage is the speed of the memory you’re using. Nothing will be as fast as the storage built into the device, but we want to keep the bottleneck as open as possible. That means you’ll need a quick flash drive or external hard drive which is using USB 3.0. We’ve listed a few examples below.

How to set up Adoptable Storage

Navigate to Settings
Scroll to Storage & Reset
Connect a flash drive and select it
Select Set up as device storage to convert the flash drive to adoptable storage
Format the drive (Note: once doing this, you cannot use this flash drive on other devices)
Once formatted, you will be prompted to move data to the flash drive
After data has been moved, your Shield will treat that flash drive as internal storage