So on windows a drive will not automount the first time, you have to assign a drive letter, which it then remembers. If you skip this its just a drive in the device manager with no mount.

You can accomplish the same in Linux so the drive automounts on boot with a nofail option so that if it is disconnected from the PC the boot moves on rather than waiting on the drive to become available. But otherwise thr DE will let you mount it instantly.

This is a non problem. Linux has issues but drive mounting is not one of them.