Help, error trying to write to external USB via FTP/SFTP

Hi all, I'm frustrated with having to ask this here as I consider myself really tech-savvy and my Google-fu is pretty good, but I just can't solve it.

I have a couple of Windows 10 Home/Enterprise PCs and I've got an 8TB WD Easystore formatted as exFat (because it has large video files and may be accessed by my Linux or Mac boxes directly at some point). I've been trying to share the files via SMB or SFTP, mainly the latter because of issues with Kodi and other apps accessing SMB shares well.

For SFTP, I've tried FileZilla Server and zFTPServer and everything seems good in the apps, and I've assigned write permissions within their admin interfaces, but trying to copy files up from the clients I ALWAYS get a write error as if access is denied. I would think the FTP servers are running as system accounts and would have full access as needed, and in this setup there is no Permissions option in Windows, just Sharing and Advanced Sharing (presumably due to the exFAT format?).

Can anyone tell me how you can share read/write access to an external exFAT USB drive via SMB, Samba, or SFTP in Windows 10?

Thanks!

bro67 said:

If a external drive is connected via USB, there is no way to send files to FTP, unless you have mapped it to a Virtual drive on the machine you have it connected to.

Thanks. Will Samba work or is it always the same underlying issue with USB?

burntoc said:

I would think the FTP servers are running as system accounts and would have full access as needed, and in this setup there is no Permissions option in Windows, just Sharing and Advanced Sharing (presumably due to the exFAT format?).

I wouldn't be so sure that the FTP server is running as System. You can look at Task Manager->Details to see the actual username the server is running under.

burntoc said:

Can anyone tell me how you can share read/write access to an external exFAT USB drive via SMB, Samba, or SFTP in Windows 10?

Sharing a USB drive via SMB is no different than sharing any other drive or folder in Windows.

Regardless of the filesystem, I take it?

Sure.

So I was able to confirm that SMB works fine - even with it being exFAT. The issue was (best I can tell) with Win10 deprecating SMB v1 and Kodi not supporting SMB v2 or v3 well (or v1 as of late for that matter). I installed the Kodi Leia alpha and it is working fine.