I just want to say, c0rnelius, you are a lifesaver! I’ve spent several hours trying to figure out this issue, and it’s reassuring to see I’m not the only one dealing with it. This problem must be more common than it seems. I initially thought it was related to power management, as the external drives might be drawing too much power.
In my case, I tried countless methods to disable USB power management and other tweaks, but it turns out the simple custom boot file was the ultimate solution!
For reference, I’m running v24.11.1 on an Odroid N2 with Armbian Linux 6.6.63-current-meson64
Update
This is a more widely issue it seems given there are other releated threads