Eh? I’ve never had a problem with reading NTFS drives in linux, including USB sticks and SATA/USB adapters. Are you just wanting to read them or use them as read/write? Write is a bit more tricky, requiring ntfs-3g, but most reasonable distros come with that nowadays.
Comment on Screw it, I’m installing Linux
LoafedBurrito@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The only thing that sucks about switching to linux is moving my external NTFS USB drives to my new linux server.
Linux HATES NTFS, hates usb drivers, and hates external drives that aren’t formatted to ext4. fstab doesn’t work for my WD Elements, so i just gave up and shucked the drive and put it inside.
I can’t fit 5 3.5" hard drives in my SFF dell 3070, so i’m stuck on windows right now, but they keep doing random updates the last few weeks and my windows explorer freezes constantly and my computer barely works. So i’m going to have to switch to linux and possibly reformat all 36TB’s to ext4. Not excited about that at all.
So either reformat all my external drives, buy a very expensive NAS with an external SATA port and hope my motherboard recognizes them.
BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
LoafedBurrito@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Read/Write and linux will disconnect them randomly and they show up as a completely different drive. So i tried to permanently mount the UID in fstab, but still didn’t work. Most of the fixes i’ve found online don’t work for my drives.
Fantabread@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
I had the same problem with USB docks. The filesystem didn’t matter. Without going into much detail, the solution is to use the usb-storage driver with quirks enabled instead of the uas driver. I blacklisted uas to force usb-storage on the affected devices. Some googling should turn up decent instructions.
BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
Interesting. When you say that they show up as a different drive completely, do you mean that their UUIDs change, or that they get mounted at a different point?
Anyway, random disconnection sounds like a hardware issue, maybe a USB brownout, as much as anything else. What’s your connection setup, distro and kernel version?
LoafedBurrito@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The mounting point changes. So it may be sd1, then disconnect and show up as sb1 and then i tried to permanently mount through fstab, but still didn’t work. Connection setup? Not sure what you mean by that, but computer is hardwired to the network, external drive was connected via USB 3.0 in several different ports to see if it was a motherboard issue. I am on Cinnamon Mint 22 and i believe kernel 6.14.
ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Linux doesn’t really have issues with NTFS, you just need to install the drivers.
My entire server storage is NTFS (except the boot drive) because its migrated from a windows system, but I use linux.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
yeah i can report i’ve dealt with TB-sized external NTFS-formatted disks for years and never had issues with linux with them :)
RamRabbit@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah, you will generally have a better time with exFAT, which is a format both Windows and Linux works with well. All my external drives get formatted as such.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
exFAT is great for compatibility but it doesn’t have journaling, so if there’s a power outage while writing to a file, you can expect the file to get corrupted and unusable (which sucks). apart from that, yeah, it’s great.
what i can recommend if you’re working in a big organization or group or sth is to use a network drive, i.e. a drive that’s accessed over the network. you typically don’t have problems there.
notthebees@reddthat.com 1 day ago
Is it just my experience but exfat is so much slower on windows than ntfs.
RamRabbit@lemmy.world 1 day ago
For an external drive? I guess I have never experienced that since external drives are already pretty slow.
notthebees@reddthat.com 1 day ago
Yeah, it was an 860 Evo in an external SSD. It was like half the speeds of ntfs
LoafedBurrito@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’ think this will be my best bet going forward. I still need to have my windows computer setup for modding, but i’d rather use linux for daily use and torrents.
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
You don’t need an expensive NAS. You can get a cheap one and force an of install Linux on that, or make one out of an SBC like an orange pi, raspberry pi, or something from Radxa. Or take an old tower off the street, clean it out, toss your drives on there and give it Linux. Or go to microcenter and get some cheap hard drive enclosures and connect via usb.
You have options. And fstab doesn’t have to be “compatible” with specifics drives. It’s just a todo list for the computer to mount filesystems listed in it. Did you make sure to disable bitlocker on the drive you are trying to mount?
Linux works well enough with NTFS. It’s not a great idea to use as your plan A storage filesystem on anything but windows but it’s accessible by Linux so long as bitlocker is turned off.
chaosmarine92@reddthat.com 22 hours ago
I feel your pain. That was my biggest issue when I switched. Initially I switched to popos and after a month I could never get them working quite right. Eventually I changed to endeavor os and suddenly all the guides on how to mount drives actually worked.
Quazatron@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
You’re blaming Linux for less than perfect support of a proprietary filesystem that had zero documentation and was painfully reversed engineered by volunteers to a working state so you could say it sucks to have to reformat your precious drives. I’m so sorry you were inconvenienced.