Should I be able to extraxct archives to other Drives ?

[Yuccaman]

Hopefully a quick question

Should I be able to extract zip or rar archives to a USB connected Drive, or Micro SD Card ?

This is on a Stock NVidia Shield TV which has 2 fullsize USB ports (as well as a Micro SD Card slot)

I can write to and from a USB Pendrive in either port or the Micro SD Card with TC, but if I try to extract a downloaded archive file to either location, the extract begins, then stops almost immediately.

No Error message is shown.

The Shield is running Android 5 and the TC version is the latest from the Play Store.

I am *99%* sure I was asked to give TC permission to access each drive when I first tried copying files to them (whihc would have been many weeks ago when I first got the Shield)

As a comparison, I also downloaded X-Plore (also Android TV compatible) and this can extract archives to the SD card, but fails with the USB drives as it doesn't want to ask me for permission to access them (even for simple copying).

Its all very strange

[ghisler(Author)]

If the USB drive is accessed internally, then yes, writing from ZIP to USB should work. If it is accessed through a plugin, then it will not work.

[Yuccaman]

No plugin involved.

I do have the pro version of the USB plugin, but never tried to install that seeing as TC recognised the USB sticks immediately.

Its not just the USB sticks eithe,r but the same happens if I try to extract to the Micro SD card.

The extraction does begin, but erites a small portion of the file and then stops...

I wonder if its because the resulting files are very large. Although I can extract those same files to another directroy on Internal Storage just fine.

I'll try to find some smaller archives over the weekend and see if they show the same behaviour.

[Yuccaman]

Well, I kind of stumbled on this, but it appears to be due to file size....

I had created some archives to play with, and the smaller ones extracted from any drive (Internal, Micro SD, USB) to any other drive, but the large files would ONLY extract from Internal Storage to Internal Storage.

One of the larger archives had 5 separate files in it and some of these (smaller) did extract as single files between drives and others (bigger) would not.

There was only about a 10 meg gap between the files that would and would not extract, so I made up a few more archives in that range.

It appears 80000kb is the magic number. I haven't a file exactly that big, but a 79647kb file will extract from drive to drive just fine, whereas an 80342kb file will not.

I've tried with a handful of files just below and just above the 80000kb limit and experienced the same with each. Below 80000kb can extract from drive to drive fine. Above 80000kb cannot.

I haven't bothered trying to do this on my other device (Nexus 7 2013 tablet) as I know that can extract from Internal Storage to USB with large files as I have done it many times. However, that is using Stickmount

[ghisler(Author)]

Thanks for the extra info, I will try to reproduce it.

[Yuccaman]

Cheers,

Although it may now be a moot point....

NVidia have just released the Marshmallow update for the Shield TV and that may have made things worse

It appears TC can no longer write to an NTFS formatted stick. It asks for permission and when you select the root of the folder, states you have not selected the root and to try again (or cancel).

I did make a post to NVidia about it, and they reckon that wiritng to an NTFS stick was not supported in either their old Lollipop or new Marshmallow versions, yet it worked fine for me on TC in Lollipop

The recognition of an NTFS stick is also really poor, sometimes the drive won't get recognised at all and other times it does, but shows up on TC as an SD card.

Under Lollipop, it was USB drives each time.

FAT32 sticks work the same as before.

I assume all of these issues are going to be within the OS layer and not anything under your control.

[ghisler(Author)]

Marshmallow works differently: You need to use the blue "+" command to add external sticks and secondary sd-cards.

[Yuccaman]

I have only had to use the Blue + command to get an NTFS stick recognised.

This is shown by TC as an SD Card though (unsure if that is by design).

If I insert a FAT32 stick, that is seen as USB automatically without needing to add it as a User Defined Location.

Interestingly, I have *sometimes* seen the NTFS stick recognised as SD Card 2 in TC with the filepath showing as /storage/xxxxxxxx/ where the xxxxxxx is the ref used by the OS to refer to this unique NTFS drive.

I can't get that to show tonight though.

Writing to the FAT32 stick works fine, but not to the NTFS stick.

However, I sideloaded Nexus Meida Importer and was able to write to the NTFS stick, but if mounted through NMI, the USB stick is not visible to other apps (apart from TC)

Its all a bit of a mess to be honest

I cant really try things on any toher device as I only have a Nexus 7 2013 along with the Shield TV and the Nexus is USB OTG only...