System Monitoringand Management-part 1: Hard Disk

To check the hard disk space (free and used) of your PC’S hard disk. Open the system tray and type Disk Usage Analyzer (for Ubuntu) or any such name in different distro.

On the disk usage analyzer in Ubuntu you should be able to see a hard drive with an Ubuntu logo and then a graphic representation of the amount of free and total space of the drive.

Here my hard drive (code name ‘pandora‘) has a total of 94.6GB and I’ve used about 73.6GB. And below is my external hard drive of 149.6GB (143.2GB used already).

Using the command-line:

The df command displays the amount of disk space available on the file system. If no file name is given, the space available on all currently mounted file systems is shown.

Or;

df -h

The first column of the output is the device (files system), column 2: is the total size of the device, column 3: is the used amount of memory, column 4: the available memory space, column 5: the percentage usage and column 6: the location where the device is mounted. The -h option is used to make the output display in the form of megabytes (MB) and gigabytes (GB). From the command above it shows that Linux is installed as the /dev/sda6 file system, so to see the memory allocation we can use the command;

df -h /dev/sda6