Hi!
Today it’s an Offtopic blog post, and I really hope to help someone to save some time if they find a similar error.
For about 10 years I always have a Linksys router at home. I have been through several models and the truth is that I think they are the best option taking into account the balance between quality and price. About a year ago, and to cover my house, I bought the model:
Linksys EA9300 Max-Stream AC4000 Tri-Band Wi-Fi Router
A triband router that supports well all the devices I have at home. Now that we also have connected devices that control the swimming pool, and more things in the yard, has come a time when I have to think of a Mesh Using a device like the [Ubiquiti Networks AFI-HD AmpliFi], but that is not the subject of this post. By the way, the references are the links of the products I mention.
One of the features that I had never used in these Routers, is the one which allows to connect and share contents from an external disk on the local network.
A few weeks ago, during the Amazon Prime Day offers, I decided to buy 2 external disks Seagate Expansion 8TB, and make them available to my little ones in my home network. My idea was to connect them by default and see how they organically evolve. I am quite aware that the needs of my local network will change over time, so best I can do is review the same periodically and see how I can work to make it work optimally. This is applying Agile in the family.
Once I had configured access to the disk, the truth is that everything worked perfectly for a couple of weeks. However, all of a sudden, the contents of the disc were not more accessible on the network. Inside the Linksys configuration I read a warning with the following message
Unsupported partition or drive mapping detected
The disk is formatted in NTFS, and when connected to a computer I see that the files are still there. Here I will spare the explanation of all the tests I did, however, at some point in these tests stage I realized:
The router software began to give problems when the disk had more than 4TB of contents.
Reading in the Linksys user support forums, it seems that limit are 3TB. With those parameters in mind, it was best to create a pair of partitions on my disk that did not exceed the 3TB. Create 2 3TB partitions and a little more than 1GB.
With this configuration, I could have my disk again with all the files available on the internal network. Y as a bonus I got a share of 3TB per son, so my little ones know what space each one has.
While the router still shows the error of Unsupported Partition, it seems that the access on the internal network works properly.
As I mentioned before, for the family use that we give, this is enough. As soon as you do an Upgrade, or try A Mesh, maybe write about it.
Happy coding!
Greetings @ Burlington
El Bruno
References
El Bruno 
Thank you!
Was having the exact same issue with a 6TB Seagate Expansion drive and my Linksys router. (I’m on hold waiting for a “chat” session to begin with Linksys support as I type this). Not looking forward to having to backup the drive before partitioning into 2 drives, but I guess I’ll figure it out. Have you had any more issues since discovering this workaround? You said it still gives you the error message but works nonetheless? Is that still the case? I’ve only got 875gb of data on the drive, but it still stopped being recognized on my network after a few weeks, so maybe the amount of content wasn’t the key factor in the problem?
Thanks again!
Jim
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Hi James
At the end, I used a Raspberry Pi to share my disk in my home network. As you mentioned, It didn’t make any sense to have to partition the disk. Thanks for the feedback !
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Hi again,
I didn’t have much data on the drive and so could “shrink” the drive, then create a second partition. So, two 3TB drives and all is working beautifully.
Thanks again, and glad you also found a solution.
Jim
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