Read/Write to NTFS AND multiple USB hard drives!

Well, I have been on a mission for the past few days not only to allow r/w for NTFS on the Mojo, but also to be able to use more than one USB device (hard drives, sticks) at once. I noticed by default if I had my 2TB HD connected and then connected another drive, the second drive would not show up. Not until the first drive was unmounted. Basically, one drive at a time. Well, this does not cut it for me as I would like to be able to leave my 2TB connected to the hub and then connect a secondary drive whenever I wanted to move items over to the larger drive. After testing various applications, I FINALLY found the fix.

Initially I tried Paragon NTFS, and while that worked, it was buggy. The NTFS drive would not unmount sometimes, and I had to mount it to a custom folder even to get it to work.

But then, I tried Chainfire's "Stickmount". It works! It re-mounts your drives to /sdcard/usbStorage/sda1, sdb1, etc. My 2TB is sda1, when I connect my 500GB NTFS it is sdb1, etc. Copying/moving/deleting on NTFS works (my 500GB is formatted NTFS) and copying from one drive to another works. It all just works. The program auto loads on reboot and auto mounts everything. If I use the app to unmount, it will unmount the last mounted drive first (my 500GB, then my 2TB if I choose again) which works out beautifully. Now I can leave my 2TB media drive in there at all times, and if I want to either bring something to it or work with some other files on a USB stick...well I just have to insert it and in a few seconds it is also mounted

I had to reroute all of my emulators paths to look for my roms at the new location and Poweramp to look at the new location for my MP3's, but thats all. Now I have multiple drive support as well as NTFS r/w support. Fantastic. I tried rebooting several times and it remounts each time. Read various games, movies and so on from the mounted drives and everything works.

Just a heads up on this EASY fix. What an awesome application! All you need for this is root

gwaldo said:

Hey thanks for sharing, but not many people check the dev forums, maybe delete this one and create it in the general forum :/
Does it spin down the drives while not in use and activate them back when required?

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I believe spindown is a feature of the hard drive more than it is a feature of the OS (or OS tells the HD to spin down, and if the HD has the feature it will). My HD is a 2TB Seagate with it's own power plug. It is always available when I access it so I assume it is not spinning down. I used to be heavily into the Wii (hacking, modding, etc) a long time ago and remember running into issues with hard drive spindown (some would and some would not) and it ended up being the HD's firmware that either told it to or not to.Some manufacturers offered an alternate firmware with no spin down, and some did not (mostly WD drives). Where the Wii was concerned, you did not want it spinning down when you were running DVD rips

I have been using stickmount now for a few days and it has not let me down. It works great. I only wish I could find a way to have Android not auto mount the HD. Basically when you boot the Mojo with a HD connected, Android will mount it. Stickmount wil also mount it. Not a big deal, but you end up with the same drive on two different mount points. Every other drive you plug in afterward are mounted only by stickmount of course.

One thing I should mention is to make sure you hit "yes" for downloading additional files when you first run it. This downloads the NTFS 3G and exFAT drivers

joecacti said:

Mounting with stickmount is the only way I've been able to get write on my NTFS drive, but I'm trying to get it to happen automatically at boot. What I have to do is use Paragon to unmount the drive, then use Stickmount to do the mounting. The stickmount unmount doesn't work, and the Paragon mount doesn't result in a writeable drive...
What I would really like to do is disable the automatic Android mount on startup... I'm thinking that will allow Stickmount to do the mounting automatically... Thoughts?

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Although I no longer own the Mojo, I will say that stickmount does mount on boot if you purchase the Pro version. The only issue I had was that multiple mount points then existed because Stickmount mounted and Android mounted. It made things annoying like certain music players finding two of the same song and so on. I searched high and low for the ability to disable the internal Android auto mounting of USB drives, but could not find any solution.