How do I find the remaining space on an External Drive?

Question

Through terminal on Linux, what exactly would I type to find External HDDs and their remaining storage space?

Solution

Linux doesn't differentiate between external and internal drives in any obvious way* – so you'll need to get a bit sneaky to get what you want.

Let's start with the most common scenario – you're running a desktop Linux install, and the drive was mounted for you by some helper program – in which case your drive might have a mount point that looks like /media/username/disklabel/.

If you mounted it manually, you'd know the location – and generally this would be under /media/ or, if you're doing it old-school, /mnt/.

So, if you start with:

df -h

… which would give you Disk Free, Human readable, and filtered the output to any entry whose Mounted on column pointed at an obvious location for external drives, like /media/, you have a good chance of finding the amount of disk free for just your external drives.

_{* On some older kernels, with the older ATA driver, PATA hard drives were denoted by /dev/hdX and most other drives were treated as SCSI drives with a /dev/sdX designation. On a system with no SCSI or SATA drives, there was a good chance external USB drives would be under /dev/sdX. Modern kernels however treat everything as a SCSI drive.}

Comments

[Java Girl]

you can use df -h

[ion]

Thanks you Scandalist, your help is appreciated greatly.

[nerdwaller]

@Scandalist - Why not make that an answer?

[nerdwaller]

Sorry for the downvote, however the site's defined reason for the button is: "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful (click again to undo)" (emphasis added).

[9A4Sc6GW4LkvRD]

Windows OS > WinSCP > select everything > Properties. Sorry, but I have tried all variations of df after being told that my drive was full and found that every answer returned was completely and totally inaccurate, and that I actually have plenty of free space on both by main drive and the USB drive.