Esata/IDE dock with other USB/Card readers unable to use LL4

[Dookus]

The idea of formatting the drive ext4 even though there are windows drivers for Linux based formats is not what I need, the drive is close to full, I have another identical drive that is almost full, difficult as if I want to retain my data, the idea of Linux was to be an alternative to Windows? am I right? the idea of not being able to use hardware on both platforms makes it less so, at least for me!