🔗 NTFS-3G on Arch Wiki 🔗 Udiskie GitHub

I needed to mount an external disk with NTFS filesystem on an Arch-based system. After some digging, this turned out to be the most reliable and persistent method.

Install NTFS-3G

To properly support NTFS (especially for writing), ntfs-3g is still the most compatible driver.

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sudo pacman -S ntfs-3g

Create a mount point

Standard procedure — create a directory where the disk will be mounted.

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sudo mkdir -p /mnt/ntfsdisk

This location can be changed as needed. Just ensure it’s writable and accessible by the user or scripts that will use it.

Mount the NTFS drive manually

Use the ntfs-3g driver explicitly.

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sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /mnt/ntfsdisk

Replace /dev/sdb1 with the actual device identifier. You can check it with:

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lsblk

or

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sudo fdisk -l

Check contents and verify

After mounting, confirm that the contents are accessible:

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ls /mnt/ntfsdisk

Unmount when done

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sudo umount /mnt/ntfsdisk

Automating the Mount (Optional)

To avoid manual mounting every time, udiskie is a lightweight automounter that integrates with udisks2.

Install it:

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sudo pacman -S udiskie

Then run it (ideally from your session or startup script):

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udiskie --tray &

This enables auto-mounting when drives are plugged in, with an optional tray icon for status/control.

Custom Mount Options

For persistent configuration, define NTFS mount options in the udisks2 config. This allows you to override the defaults with user-specific behavior.

Create or edit:

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sudo nano /etc/udisks2/mount_options.conf

Example config:

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[defaults]
ntfs_defaults=uid=$UID,gid=$GID,windows_names,big_writes
ntfs_allow=uid=$UID,gid=$GID,umask,dmask,fmask,locale,windows_names,big_writes
ntfs_drivers=ntfs,ntfs3

This makes sure UID/GID match the current user, allows compatibility with Windows filenames, and improves performance with big_writes.

This setup has been solid for external NTFS drives and keeps things simple with minimal manual steps. Clean, functional, works every time.