List Disks on Ubuntu

In this article, I am going to show you how to list disks (i.e. SSDs, HDDs, USB thumb drives) attached on your computer from Ubuntu. So, let’s get started.

Using lsblk Command:

You can list all the attached disks on your computer from Ubuntu using the lsblk command as follows:

$ sudo lsblk

The ones with the TYPE disk are the physically attached disks on your computer.

The ones with the TYPE part are the partitions of the disks.

The lsblk command without any filter shows a lot of loop devices that are used by the Ubuntu snap apps. It is annoying I know. Luckily, you can easily get rid of them from the list.

You can use the -e7 option with lsblk to hide the loop devices.

$ sudo lsblk -e7

Now that the loop devices are gone, the list looks much clearer now.

You can also do the same thing with grep.

$ sudo lsblk | grep -v '^loop'

You can also hide the CD/DVD rom device from the list. Just add the -e11 option along with -e7 option.

$ sudo lsblk -e7 -e11

You can also list the attached disks on your computer, and their vendor and model information using lsblk as follows:

$ sudo lsblk --scsi

As you can see, all the attached disks on my computer are listed. Their vendor and model information are also listed.

Using fdisk Command:

You can also list all the attached disks on your computer from Ubuntu using the fdisk command as follows:

$ sudo fdisk -l

fdisk shows all the disks, their total size, their partitions, size of each partitions etc. But sadly, the list is too long and there is no easy way to hide the loop devices.

But if you know the device name (i.e. sda, sdb) of your disk, you can find more information about it very easily with fdisk.

$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb

You can also find information about more than one disk at the same time with fdisk. Just put the disks paths as fdisk arguments one after the other.

$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda /dev/sdb

Using parted Command:

You can use parted to do the same thing. parted may not be installed by default on Ubuntu. But you can easily install it with the following command:

$ sudo apt install parted -y

You can get a fdisk like output for all the storage disks attached on your computer with parted as follows:

$ sudo parted -l

As you can see, the output format is the same as in fdisk, but parted does not list the annoying loop devices. That’s a good thing.

Using GNOME Disks App:

If you don’t like to use the command line, then there are many graphical programs you can use to list disks on Ubuntu.

GNOME Disks is the default partitioning app on GNOME desktop environment. You can use it to list the disks attached on your computer.

First, open GNOME Disks from the Application Menu.

GNOME Disks should be opened. On the left side, you will see all the attached storage devices/disks on your computer. To find more information about the disk, click to select the disk. The disk size, partitions and other information about the disk should be listed on the right side.