How to connect 4 bay hard drive enclosure to an Android TV box?

Android TV boxes will not recognise storage greater than 2TBs.

If you have a four bay HDD box you will need 4 X 500 GB HDDs.

Actually, each USB port is limited to 2 TBs.
So, if you have 4 USB ports, you can connect 8 TBs of data.

You could do what I do... Run Serviio on a cheap PC and add the 8 TB drive to it.
Then add the drive to your Kodi library.

DigitALL said:

When you say "Android TV boxes will not recognise storage greater than 2TBs" does that mean that is cumulative? That the all the drives combined should be at 2TB? If that is true then Android really sucks, sucks big time.

Click to expand...

This Mediasonic Pro box is RAID isn't it? Wouldn't have thought Android being designed as a lightweight mobile OS would include support for that. Not too many people hooking up hard-disk RAID arrays to their phones probably.And with this "TX8" being a $20 cheapy, don't expect magic or too much support from the whatever unknown manufacturer. Same with "MXQ" or whatever other marques they like to use for these things.

DigitALL said:

It seems that after so many years of development there are still tons of bugs and limitations. I feel running Windows95.

Click to expand...

Win 95 being a PC desktop OS, even though it's ancient, supports RAID of course(provided suitable drivers are installed). Might have to do some sort of PC server arrangement with the RAID, and possibly serve content to the Android TV box from that. Exact details I don't know, I've never done this.

I'll elaborate on my system a bit as it may help the original poster.

I have put together a cheapish PC which has a 'C' drive for the Windows 10 OS and other program installations.
It also has 3 other drives installed and arranged in what Windows calls 'Storage Spaces'.
You can add and subtract drives from this 'pool' of drives and configure it to 'RAID' as well if you want to.

Mine is set up so the three HDDs show up as a single 'L' drive.
(The drive letter is 'L' for library. Clever, eh?)

There are 2 X 2 TB drives and a 1 TB drive... but I have it set up to read as 7 TBs.
(I will add another 2 TB drive soon!)
You set the pool of drives up to read whatever TB number you want and you can add and subtract drives whenever you want.

On this 'drive' all three (soon to be four) HDDs are used up equally so that they share the load of my 5 TBs of movies and TV shows, etc.

I have installed SERVIIO as the server on my PC.
It's very low on resources, easy to learn, runs as a Windows service at start-up and it's FREE!

Once the SERVIIO server software has read and recorded all the media files, (this can take a while!), I simply add it to my KODI library.
(The TV box and the PC have to be either on the same WiFi network or connected to the router with LAN cables.)

If you do decide to go down this path, let me know because there are some SERVIIO settings that will make this process a lot easier... but I can't be arsed to write down here!

DigitALL said:

Andrew, thank you for the guidance. I had in mind the NAS option and probably will go for it to not depend what platform I will run Kodi.

However I am still amazed of the infant Android. "mikedit", indeed Android was initially developed for mobiles but not anymore. Since there is market for a $20 devices (mine was a $100, running an 8 core chip and 32G flash but still a piece of crap since there is no proper OS), Google is trying to capture this market and they did so since version 4 to cover multiple devices. If I am not mistaken this is happening in the last 3-4 years and I see all the reasons for Google to properly accommodate storage. Probably we should wait few more years...

Click to expand...

Yeh, I'm sure Google wants you to use their Drive cloud storage and stream all your Google Movies online, and no Nexus or Pixel devices have expandable storage.

BTW TX8 octo-core Amlogic "fully loaded" Kodi, those sell for about $40-50 at the local tech mall.

DigitALL said:

Mediasonic ProBox has the capability to configure it in RAID mode but I never mention RAID. I just have 8 disks of 2TB each with meadia, no RAID. My questions was simple.

Click to expand...

I've never seen or heard of that one before, I thought it was like a Drobo, which is RAID.

DigitALL said:

Andrew, thank you for the guidance. I had in mind the NAS option and probably will go for it to not depend what platform I will run Kodi.

However I am still amazed of the infant Android. "mikedit", indeed Android was initially developed for mobiles but not anymore. Since there is market for a $20 devices (mine was a $100, running an 8 core chip and 32G flash but still a piece of crap since there is no proper OS), Google is trying to capture this market and they did so since version 4 to cover multiple devices. If I am not mistaken this is happening in the last 3-4 years and I see all the reasons for Google to properly accommodate storage. Probably we should wait few more years...

Mediasonic ProBox has the capability to configure it in RAID mode but I never mention RAID. I just have 8 disks of 2TB each with meadia, no RAID. My questions was simple.

Click to expand...

I have a Seagate 4tb "cloud drive" attached directly to my router via gigabit lan, on which I store all my media (and data backups). I download via my PC and transfer to the Seagate via AC wireless lan. My A95X runs Kodi with my library set as the 4tb Seagate. It uses AC lan to stream my media. All works flawlessly with no restrictions on the size of the seagate storage.
Perhaps you could try connecting your nas drives to your router and access them from your tv box?

Mediasonic ProBox has the capability to configure it in RAID mode...

Click to expand...

Yes, it does. I have one of these (although I haven't used it for many years.)

It's a bit tricky to get set up as you have to keep an eye on the flashing lights on the front to know what 'mode' you are getting in and out of!

The other downside of that box is that all the drives MUST be the same size. You can't mix and match any drives you have lying around.

I stopped using it when a lightning storm fried three of the four drives I had in the box... although the box itself was undamaged!
(Back then 2 TB drives were bloody expensive, too. Grrr!)
(At least I'm pretty sure it was that damned storm that did in those drives... either way, I was wary of using it again!)

But even though it's a very slow USB 2 box it still works OK as a media storage (read only) drive for your movies, TV shows, etc.

With KODI, if the box has been idle for a few minutes, you may have to wait a while for the drives to spin up before a file will play... by which time KODI will have got bored of waiting and time out. You'll have to press the media file a second time to get it to play.