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I've recently tried a number 1 or 2TB external hard drives on USB as backup and hoping to use for deja-dup. The one I had previously was fine but it's full and I don't want to loose it. I've tried both SSD and old fashioned type drive. I got them online from ebay etc about £20. Problem is they are formatted exFat and, as I understand it, that is not ok for Ubuntu. I've tried to format as Ext4 or NTFS but they don't format right. It usually involves waiting a very long time to finish up with I/O errors and drive unusable. Is there a reason why modern external USB hard drives cannot be formatted on Ubuntu (20.04)? or have I just been really unlucky and managed to buy three bad drives all in a row? Tried gParted. I've even tried formatting on a Windows7 PC but still I cannot get any of the drives back to working.

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    exFAT is perfectly fine. The drives you bough, OTOH, aren't. For such price you were a victim of a scam, that's all. Please report the seller.
    – ChanganAuto
    May 31, 2022 at 17:50
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    eBay is one of THE WORST places to buy computer storage, if my research is correct. A 1 TB WD EasyStore is $48 here in the US, at Best Buy. And that's one of the cheapest reliable drives here. So sadly, you probably got scammed. Only buy drives from reliable manufacturers (WD and SeaGate, for instance), and only buy them from reliable stores like Best Buy. Otherwise, you could get a scam drive or a used drive.
    – ArrayBolt3
    May 31, 2022 at 19:52
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    Please do a scan with F3 to see if your "1 TB drives" are actually 1 TB. It is quite likely that they are rather smaller than that, especially since they were so cheap.
    – Esther
    Jun 1, 2022 at 14:09
  • see askubuntu.com/questions/737473/… for instructions
    – Esther
    Jun 1, 2022 at 14:17
  • At £20, you should think "If something seems too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true."
    – Andrew Morton
    Jun 1, 2022 at 21:03

3 Answers 3

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Problem is they are formatted exFat and, as I understand it, that is not ok for Ubuntu.

Not really a problem BUT you do need to install a driver for it. Command to issue:

sudo apt install exfat-fuse exfat-utils

It is the default filesystem if you want the best support over all operating systems.

It usually involves waiting a very long time to finish up with I/O errors and drive unusable. or have I just been really unlucky and managed to buy three bad drives all in a row? I've even tried formatting on a Windows7 PC but still I cannot get any of the drives back to working.

That seems fishy to me: it might be the cable or the connector on your system and not the drives itself but if 3 drives do not work and you format with multiple filesystems and on two different operating systems ... those drives are bad.

There is a tool you can use:

sudo badblocks -wvs /dev/sdx

or

sudo smartctl -t long /dev/sdx

where x is your drive letter (fdisk -l to list all).

That will quickly tell you if the disks are healthy. A full scan of 1Tb will also take an hour ;)

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    They're £20 SCAMs obviously.
    – ChanganAuto
    May 31, 2022 at 18:00
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Are Fake USB Storage Devices Still Around in 2022? (The answer is yes.)

These are most likely fake drives programmed to show terabyte-level capacity, while in reality there's just a couple gigabytes of storage in them. Usually users find out when they realize the files they have copied have disappeared or are damaged.

Fake drives are not salvageable.

You may be tempted to use them with exFAT. It's not a good idea. You'll end up with data loss. Not a good scenario for backups.

Some people may suggest figuring out the real capacity and partitioning the drive to not exceed it. This approach seems sensible at first, but it can backfire: drive's controller will still be unaware of the underlying storage chip being smaller than it should and it will try to use its full capacity for wear leveling. There goes your data.

Ask for a refund and if you get to keep the drives, use them as paperweights or something.

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exFat works fine in Ubuntu, even though it's proprietary Windows file format. If your driver can't mount automatically after installing the right package (sudo apt install exfat-fuse exfat-utils)

Go to Disks -> Choose the disk -> Click on the configuration icon (called Additional partition options) -> Edit Mount Options... -> Turn on "User Session Defaults".

mount problems resolved

In my case the problem with mounting appeared after using the SDD on Windows. The mount point "/mnt/sdb1" started to be incorrect somehow.

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