I forget the exact terminology but I tried putting it into the most permissive mode available. Is still could not work with external hard drives. This was several years ago so I can’t say what might have changed since then, but I did spend some time troubleshooting and at the time that functionality did not work. I’d read that it was possible in the previous version (maybe 18.04?)
Edit: Come to think of it, it might not have been as simple as “couldn’t access external drives”. It might have had something to do with how my disks were mounted and their permissions and mount points. I remember that I hit a wall at some point and further troubleshooting would have required more surgery on my system than I was willing to attempt.
Seems weird to replace a 3080 but hey, whatever floats your goat.
I switched from Nvidia to AMD recently. As long as you have a recent kernel you should be fine. If you’re running an old/stable distro you might have issues with mesa, especially if you need OpenCL or ROCm. For general use and gaming it worked for me with no fuss.