MTP probe of USB drive

Upon attaching a USB hard drive to an old, but up to date, Linux laptop last weekend, the block device corresponding to the drive was not created. The kernel logs showed that the USB device was probed for mtp support, which failed. After searching the Web, the solution that I found was to create a script in /etc/profile.d containing Export MTP_NO_PROBE=1 Are there better solutions than disabling MTP probes altogether?