this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The dev entry point changing like that means that it disconnected and then reconnected, which shouldn’t have anything to do with the specific file system on the drive. That really makes it sound like the drive isn’t getting quite enough power, which causes a brown out, which Linux detects as the drive getting unplugged and coming back, which is why it gets a new dev entry.
A look through the usb logs by using something like usbrip would confirm that.