One of the cooler things about NVIDIA Shield TV is that it's primed and ready to be used with an external flash drive. That is, you can pop one in and instantly have more storage — by an order (or two) of magnitude.
And you've also got options for how to use that storage. You can use it as traditional external file storage, or you can use it as an extension of the Android TV system itself. It's your call — you'll be asked which you want to use when you first plug in and format — and it really just depends on how you want to use things.
You also can either use a traditional HDD (that is, the old-school kind with the spinning platter), or a flash drive. There are benefits to both, to be sure, and read and write speeds will vary depending on model. (Whether you want to worry about that sort of thing is entirely up to you. I've had a 1TB Seagate 2.5-inch HDD plugged in for some time now without a single problem)
NVIDIA doesn't go so far as to recommend HDDs for use with Shield TV, but it does recommend a couple of flash drives.
If you're looking for a flash drive for your Shield TV, this is where we'd start. You can double your storage on the Shield TV for just $5.99. But if you're really serious, just go ahead and spring $28 for the 128GB drive, or $62 for the 256GB drive.
Because nobody ever wished they didn't have more storage space, right?
This USB 3.0 flash drive comes in four flavors — 16GB, 32GB, 64GB and 128GB. The smallest size starts at about $20, and the largest tops out at $90. That would get you about eight times more storage than what comes on Shield TV, which isn't bad at all.
So really the only question you have to ask yourself is how much you want to spend.
