NTFS Access Unreliable

    I have built a media player using LibreELEC. The system is a i5 12600k CPU, Asus Prime B660 motherboard, 512 GB nvme drive(to install LibrELEC), 64 GB of ram and a AMD RX6650 GPU. There is no other OS in this system just the one drive with LibreELEC install on it.

    The system runs fine, I have 7 x 8TB hard disks (Spinning Rust) not SSDs which i store my media on. They are as follows 4K, 4K box sets 1080p, 1080p box sets, Old 720p, Tv Series and Black and white Classics. All these drives are formatted NTFS.

    My issue is "sometimes" when i save a movie to one of my drives. The drive can't be seen anymore in Kodi. If I remove the drive and plug it into my desktop (running linux mint) the drive shows up no problem and all the data is there. When I then put it back into my media PC kodi now see's it. But if I just unplug the drive leave it say 10 mins them plug it back in it still will not show up in kodi. I have to remove it and plug it into my computer first.

    It seems to me to be a mounting issue. Once Kodi writes to a drive it loses the mount point. When I plug it into my desktop Linux fixes something and now kodi can see it again. I am not sure of this its just a guess.

    I how googled this issue and the best answer was NTFS drives don't play nice with Linux system. Is this true? If this is my issue them my question becomes what format is best to us with kodi? ext4, btfs, exfat, or what?

    Because I really can't afford 7 New 8TB drives I will buy 1 and format it to which ever format is best and copy 1 drive at a time.

    Thank you for taking the time to read this post. Any help will be appreciated

    NTFS support has come a long way in recent times but we still see issues (similar to what you describe) reported with the in-kernel drivers. You can also install the older NTFS-3G driver which runs via FUSE (so a lot slower) which might be more reliable.

    If you want to eliminate the shenanigans do a rolling reformat to a native Linux filesystme like EXT4 or XFS. My personal preference is EXT4 as this allows filesystem shrinking in the event you ever need to juggle partitions (XFS only allows expansion) but that's not a frequent requirement for a media box.

    Better still, shuck the drives into a Synology NAS case and avoid all those cables attaching USB drives. The ease of use and features and proper hardware design are worth the $$.

    heretic

    Please install the NTFS-3G addon which is now installable from the LE12 (and LE13) repo (in Services)

    We had a number of new LE users with external USB drives formatted with NTFS that kept having this problem after connecting their drives to Windows PCs to add new media.

    The initial fix was to run: chksdsk /f (repair a ‘broken’ drive) but this addon solved their problem permanently.

    Da Flex could you please edit the thread title to include ‘NTFS’ so others can find this fix.