Greetings RVers
In this previous post, I outlined what it would take to spin up a Plex Media Server while for use on the road without an internet connection.
I’m using this post as an event timeline, to chronicle my efforts. As pointed out previously, I am motivated to use Roku and Plex in my fifth wheel because that’s what I use at home — I want the same experience. I’m also aware that the Plex app is designed to use with an internet connection, so there are some tricks one has to do in order for it to work. the most important is this: You must use a Plex client that will tolerate lack of internet! so far, the plex client that works for me is a Roku streaming stick (I have Roku Ultras that don’t work for this…). So with that out of the way here’s the way this story is unfolding:
October, 2021: I continue to experience problems with the WD My Passport Wireless Pro. The most recent problem is that it will not support more than one stream at a time, and that one stream might be aborted at any time — in the middle of a song or movie, for example. I’m pretty frustrated with Western Digital (as noted in the previous post), and this continues today. WD has announced to me that if they can reproduce the problems I have, any fix will come in the form of a software solution. This means there is nothing defective about my particular unit, and WD knows it. RVer’s take note: This is a very flakey solution.
November, 2021. In a very interesting twist of events, Western Digital has offered to exchange my Wireless Passport pro with another WD product. It was quite painful to get to this point, but this is good — It means WD knows that this is not a good solution and so my investment is not wasted. I decided to ditch the passport pro entirely and will build up a true NAS, so my product choice was a pair of WD 6TB Red Plus drives, which WD approved.
December, 2021: I received one of the two WD Red Plus drives via UPS, and have been waiting for the other one for a few weeks. Then I read more closely and learned that the first RMA set up for me was to ship out a WD Red Plus drive (the one I already received) but the other RMA was set up so that I had to return my Wireless Pro before they sent me the other Red Plus Drive. I paid for the UPS return label and shipped it out on 12/11.
January, 2020: Western Digital is out of inventory for their EFRX type “Red Plus” Drives and offered to ship a newer model with a larger cache. I requested a matched pair and have not heard back yet
