Disks (formerly GNOME Disk Utility) is an open source software that lists mounted storage devices and virtual disk images, allowing users to manipulate them in any way possible.
The application looks exactly like the Disk Utility software of the Mac OS X operating system. It lets users to view detailed information about a certain storage device, such as model, size, partitioning, serial number, assessment, and device path.
In addition, for each drive, the software can display detailed volume information in both graphical and text modes, such as partition type, size, absolute path, filesystem type, and mounted point.
Features at a glance
There are various options for each partition and drive, allowing users to deactivate, mount, unmount, format, delete or benchmark them. You can also do all these action in batch mode, using multiple selected drives at once.
Another interesting feature is the ability to view SMART attributes and run self-tests on a specific disk drive, which will tell you if the device is OK or not and if it contains errors. Also, you can apply advanced power management and write cache settings for each listed disk.
Besides the standard storage devices like SSD (Solid Disk Drive), HDD (Hard Disk Drive) and USB flash drive, the program can also mount and list ISO and IMG disk images, which can be deployed (restored) to one of the aforementioned disk drives that are mounted on your machine. It can also list optical devices, such as CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs or Blu-Ray drives.
Designed for GNOME
It is distributed as part of the GNOME desktop environment, but it can also be installed on other open source window managers as a standalone application, through the default software repositories of your Linux distribution.
Bottom line
Overall, Disks is an essential application for the GNOME desktop environment, as well as for any Linux-based operating system. It allows you to format and partition disk drives, as well as to write ISO images to USB sticks.
