USB drives mounting differently since Setember update

Help and Support
1

Since the September update, a flash drive and a USB-powered external disk are now coming up as mounted using exfat - they used to be fuseblk.

I don’t know why this is occurring or if this will be an issue - the partition types etc appear to match at least one of the drives still being mounted as fuseblk…

$ df -Th
Filesystem          Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs            devtmpfs  991M     0  991M   0% /dev
tmpfs               tmpfs     995M  1.6M  993M   1% /run
/dev/vero-nand/root ext4       14G  1.5G   12G  12% /
tmpfs               tmpfs     995M     0  995M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs               tmpfs     5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
/dev/sde1           exfat     921G  806G  116G  88% /media/Sandisk 1TB
/dev/sda2           fuseblk   3.7T  3.6T  107G  98% /media/Seagate Backup Plus Drive
/dev/sdd1           fuseblk   1.9T  1.8T   24G  99% /media/TwoTera
/dev/sdc2           exfat     4.6T  4.5T   81G  99% /media/5iveTerror
/dev/sdb1           fuseblk   932G  926G  5.8G 100% /media/SAMSUNG 1TB
tmpfs               tmpfs     199M     0  199M   0% /run/user/1000

fdisk reveals:

$ fdisk -l /dev/sdd
Disk /dev/sdd: 1.82 TiB, 2000365289472 bytes, 3906963456 sectors
Disk model: My Passport 0748
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x0005f107

Device     Boot Start        End    Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sdd1        2048 3906963455 3906961408  1.8T  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

$ fdisk -l /dev/sde
Disk /dev/sde: 920.39 GiB, 988261908480 bytes, 1930199040 sectors
Disk model: 3.2 Gen 1
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00225d51

Device     Boot Start        End    Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sde1        2048 1930199039 1930196992 920.4G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

If anyone can shed any light on this I would much appreciate it!

2

fuse = filesystem in user space and is used when no direct kernel support for that format is build in.
If exfat is now directly used than that is because the Kernel has now direct exfat support.

The ones listed as fuseblk could e.g. be nfts formatted.

lsblk -f would tell you the format

3

We now use the kernel based exFAT driver instead of FUSE by default.

This gives significantly better performance - particularly for writing.

4

Thanks - that makes sense.

5

Thanks for that.

I’ll just have to rewrite my ‘you mysteriously lost a disk’ checking script to expect exfat mounts as well! Although since I’m on a nice stable release now this may well no longer be an issue I’ll face anymore - it was a sporadic problem when running 4.9 kernel and Kodi 19 testing builds.