raspberrypi

Pardon in advance if this is the wrong community for support questions. I'm happy to move my thread elsewhere if need be.

I have a trusty old RPi4B, it's run LibreElec since day one and continues to do so without problem.

I have a 5Tb USB drive that houses all my media files connected to one of the USB3 ports, but it needs replacing as my collection has grown. So I bought two 5Tb replacement drives to split up the collections and have one for movies, one for TV.

Both my USB2 ports are occupied, one by a Bluetooth keyboard receiver, the other by a flash drive for added storage. I have no plans to move or get rid of those.

When I connected my replacement drives via USB3 the other day, they didn't mount or register in the LibreElec device list; one made an ongoing clicking sound like it failed to read. More worrying, I got on-screen messages that the USB2 connected flash drive got unmounted and re-mounted in a loop.

So there are a couple of problems here:

1. The new USB drives fail to mount — that could very well be a formatting issue, or just bad drives.
   • I checked the clicky drive with my laptop immediately, but it seemed fine, though.
   • Both replacement drives are formatted exFAT, as is the drive I've had connected for several years.
2. A drive not mounting on USB3 causes one on USB2 to mount/unmount over and over — this I need more help with, as I assumed the two ports/port pairs would be on different circuits?

I'm hoping somebody with more experience can help out. I tend to set things and forget about them over several years, so I'd hoped this would be an easy replacement. Clearly something is amiss, probably with my new drives — but also I'm confused with the secondary issue with the flash drive unmounting and mounting.

Any advice is appreciated!

EDIT: Immediate suggestions are that the Pi doesn't have the juice for this many devices and I need a powered USB hub. Will test and mark this solved if it works out!