First connect and find the drive (either dmesg or what’s in /dev/disk/by-uuid). It will probably be /dev/sda1 or /dev/sdb1 etc.

Install libfuse2 and ntfs-3g.

Reboot

sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sdxy /media/location

fstab to make it permanent

add the following line to the end of the /etc/fstab file:

/dev/sda1 /media/location1 ntfs-3g defaults 0 0</kbd>

*Edit: A better way to mount is using the hard drive’s UUID as sometimes the mounted location can change after a reboot.

Use sudo blkid to list all devices with UUIDs

Grab your HDDs UUIDs and update the fstab file as follows.

UUID=25c23c46-1111-2222-1234567890ab /media/location1 ntfs-3g defaults 0 0

If you have two of the exact same types of USB HDDs like I do (Both the same Seagate Expansion Drive HDDs) then you may end up with exactly the same UUID for both of them. In this case I ended up doing it by label instead. i.e.

LABEL=Expansion\040Drive\0402 /media/EX2 ntfs-3g defaults 0 0

(The \040 is for spaces by the way… not great in terms of readability but I couldn’t be bothered renaming them).

Next you’ll want to share you HDDs. Use Samba!

install samba

edit /etc/samba/smb.conf

It might look something like this…

[EX1]
comment = Expansion Drive 1
path = /media/EX1
browsable = Yes
writeable = Yes
only guest = no
create mask = 0777
directory mask = 0777
public = no