[Samsung Galaxy Tab A series ROMs, Kernels, Recover] sirscrubsalot:
otg-ntfs-external hdd mounting clarification with powered usb huband how to approach?

Hi luattic, I went to the brick and mortar computer store to check the SM-T580 tablet (it has stock nougat) in action before buying to see it in person and brought my external HDD (NTFS formatted) that I use for my Nexus 7 2012 lolipop 5.x stock rom and root only + micro-USB OTG + powered hub (plugs in to electrical outlet for power) to just see the NTFS playback capability. The people working there are cool and let me test it out :P

When I plugged in the external HDD drive-OTG-powered USB hub to the SM-T580 it didn't load.

I side loaded an old APK I had of ESFile Explorer before the company shifted to more shady practices and I could see the external HDD drive but trying to open it, it gave me a data corruption error but when I put it on my windows machine and nexus 7 that I brought with me, the same external HDD loaded fine. I thought the SM-T580 fried my data :eek:

To test further, I also side loaded an old version of MX Player I use on the Nexus 7 device (I had to use the free version from apkmirror since the pro version I had needed to sign in to google play to check license and I wasn't going to enter login credentials in the public store :silly:) That didn't work either.

So to give you a better idea, on my Nexus 7 from 2012, what I usually do is put all my media on these external HDD's and they are all NTFS (I can pretty much load 7 x 4tb of NTFS external HDD's on that same 7-port powered USB hub) > stickmount automatically detects and mounts to view the mounted drives in both ESfile exploer and on shows all the drives right in Mxplayer to select, load/play). SMB/samba-Home Lan and windows doesn't stream great for 6-8gb 1080p's and hence, why I was connecting the HDD's directly.

Stickmount you mentioned won't work because of the SElinux permissive. (I saw another Marshmallow ROM Kernel that looked like it supported NTFS + selinux permissive but nothing for the SM-T580 unfortunately).

https://xdaforums.com/galaxy-tab-a/development/kernel-galaxy-tab-sm-t555-5-8-2016-t3433560

This was my main and most important usage goal if buying the device because of its nice size display and specs for the media I have and just checking on any paid/free method that works well with your project. I tried searching this forum for ntfs, otg and just found 1 post with no answer:

https://xdaforums.com/galaxy-tab-a/help/ntfs-otg-t3688072

Also I was worried, if I proceeded with your instructions in OP and the NTFS external HDD's as described above didn't work, I would have to return this but not sure if it can be reverted to stock if I backup and restore with twrp after following your OP instructions for that section (samsung looks a lot different than the other devices I had). I looked at the sammobile site for an untouched image but it looks like they are all carrier versions from non-US countries.

I really wanted to buy the SM-T580 today because the price and display size is great, plus would be a huge upgrade from my 2012 Nexus 7 but after doing the test on the stock nougat at the store, I'm not sure. Personally, having nougat isn't 100% mandatory and if somehow external NTFS hdd-OTG mounting works on older android OS versions, I would downgrade to that...

Ok thanks for the time + thoughts! Maybe I'll be in for a surprise that all of this works with your OP instructions out of the box :)