I have a 1st and a 2nd gen 6TB My Cloud. I have a 5TB External HDD plugged into the back of each of these. I can see the files when searching Network on my PC, and I can go into one of my smart TVs and see them and play movies from the Network and all, but it is an ugly, clunky, file browsing system. I wanted to pretty everything up and use Plex but, to my dismay, I can’t find a way to get Plex to pull the movies on the External HDDs plugged into the cloud drives. I am able to mount the Cloud Drives themselves as public files thereby being able to get the content on the Cloud Drives themselves to work with Plex but even though I have the USB data sharing option turned on in the Cloud Drives, Plex won’t pull the data. Any ideas?
Are you using a Plex Media Server in an attempt to mount the USB drives? Where is the Plex Media Server located? On the 2nd Gen My Cloud or on a local network computer?
If Plex is running on a computer then try mapping the USB drive Share to the computer. Then try adding the mapped share via the Plex add folder option.
One other suggestion if you have tried it as a troubleshooting step, access the My Cloud Dashboard and turn on Media Serving for the USB Share via the Shares tab/page.
Are you using a Plex Media Server in an attempt to mount the USB drives? Where is the Plex Media Server located? On the 2nd Gen My Cloud or on a local network computer?
I am running the Server on an unused laptop from 2 years ago with an I7 processor and 16GB RAM on the local network. I was told this would run better than installing directly on the My Cloud device by a few people on reddit.
One other suggestion if you have tried it as a troubleshooting step, access the My Cloud Dashboard and turn on Media Serving for the USB Share via the Shares tab/page.
I guess I kind of thought when I mounted the MyCloud and because the USB sharing option was turned on ( I did check thanks for that though, as it is easy to miss) for the External HDD that was plugged into the MyCloud it would be mounted as one…
If Plex is running on a computer then try mapping the USB drive Share to the computer. Then try adding the mapped share via the Plex add folder option.
I am not super tech savvy but I’d say I’m competent and willing to learn. I have never used mapping, I though mapping was like for when you have thousands of files in a folder, the computer would “map” it so it didn’t take forever to load the list of files when you opened that folder… I will try this when I get home to see if it helps, thank you!
Mapping a network drive simply tells your file manager to make a network file server share appear like a disk attached to your computer.
Windows File Explorer calls in ‘Map Network Drive’. You map to a spare drive letter.
Make sure that when you map in Windows, you force the use of ‘different credentials’, for all shares. Enter your MyCloud user name and password as the credentials. Also useful to tick ’ re-connect at logon’.
The USB sharing option in the Dashboard is generally for the online MyCloud.com web portal and to include the USB drive in the Dashboard Home page capacity section. That setting shouldn’t affect the ability to map the USB Share or to access the USB Share with a file manager program.
Mapping is one option, another (if you haven’t done so already) is to use the direct network path to the My Cloud Share. In this case the Share containing the USB drive.
For example this is what works for me on a PMS on my local network when accessing a specific subfolder (test) containing media files on a USB drive (wd_1_tb) connected to my first gen v4.x single bay My Cloud (Wdmycloud). Note I have USB Sharing turned off in the Dashboard as I also have remote access turned off.
\\Wdmycloud\wd_1_tb\test
If using the My Cloud device name doesn’t work maybe using the IP address. And it may take PMS many hours to scan and catalogue the drive if there are a lot of media files on it.
Example screen capture of the PMS add folder dialog box. One would enter the direct network path to the media folder on the USB drive then hit the ADD button to add the folder.
I used the mapping and it worked perfectly, thank you so much!
