Android Central: Best flash drives to expand your NVIDIA Shield Android TV's storage

Monday, January 23, 2017

Best flash drives to expand your NVIDIA Shield Android TV's storage

It's cheap and easy to expand the internal storage of your set top box.

The latest revision of the NVIDIA Shield Android TV may have lost its SD card slot, but it still has two perfectly good USB 3.0 ports that can work to expand your internal storage. You can attach just about anything to those ports, but with just 16GB of internal storage, many will want to fill one with an inexpensive flash drive that can be adopted into the system and work just as if it were internal storage.

NVIDIA actually makes a great set of recommendations for which flash drives work best with your Shield, and having done some research on them ourselves, we want to point out which ones are the drives to go with.

Samsung 128GB BAR USB 3.0 Flash Drive

Samsung's "bar" flash drives are simple and offer really good value for the money. While you can get a sturdier (and flashier) metal version of this drive, if you plan to just leave it in the back of your Shield Android TV, you can save some money and get the dark blue plastic version. As a bonus, it'll better fit in with the dark plastic of the Shield itself.

You can get 32, 64, or 128GB of storage, ranging in price from $18 to $29, which is a great price per gigabyte (especially at the 128GB level) for a USB 3.0 flash drive. The drive is pretty compact as well, so it shouldn't get in the way of any cable routing you're trying to do.

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SanDisk Extreme 128GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive

The SanDisk "Extreme" name carries a lot of weight for some people as a drive that has the best possible performance and reliability. And if that's something that appeals to you and you're willing to pay a bit extra for the quality, you can get a SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 flash drive for your Shield Android TV.

This one's considerably larger than the rest on this list, but depending on your entertainment center configuration, that may not be an issue. Despite it being physically large, you don't get more in the way of storage: choose from 16, 32, 64, or 128GB, ranging in price from $22 to $65. Once again, that's more expensive, but perhaps you put some stock in that name and the claimed higher read/write speeds.

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SanDisk Ultra Fit 128GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum from the SanDisk Extreme is the SanDisk Ultra Fit USB 3.0 drive, which is absolutely tiny. It's about the size of a typical USB wireless receiver you may have plugged into a computer at some point, yet it still carries up to 128GB in storage capacity.

With a drive this tiny, you won't have any chance of seeing it poking out from the back of your Shield Android TV, which could be extremely useful if you're trying to have a slick and perfectly managed entertainment setup. You can take your pick of 32, 64, or 128GB storage for $15 to $32, which is still very reasonable. This is the one to get if your top feature is the physical size of the drive.

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SanDisk Ultra CZ48 256GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive

We've all heard it before: "go big or go home," right? SanDisk has the USB 3.0 drive for you with its Ultra 256GB model, doubling the max storage available from any of the other drives on this list. You still get the well-known name and speed classification, but the larger storage gives you even more room for apps, games, and media.

You'll pay $60 for the 256GB SanDisk Ultra drive, which is a pretty solid price-per-gigabyte value when you look at it. This flash drive is probably overkill for most people who will be better served with a 64 or 128GB drive, but we're not going to tell you that you don't deserve a full 256GB hanging out behind your Shield Android TV.

See at Amazon