How to Know the Internal & External Storage on Linux
Determine which drives on a Linux system are internal (installed in the computer) and which drives are external (connected to an external computer port) and identify the partitions and mount points for each prior to performing storage administration such as formatting unallocated space. If the attributes of each drive on the computer are not properly identified, you could mistakenly format, partition or otherwise configure the wrong drive resulting in data loss. Use the "Tail" and "DF" utilities on the Linux command line to know the particulars about drives installed on your Linux system.
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Instructions
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Plug the external storage drive into an empty port on the computer.
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Open a command line terminal on the Linux computer.
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Type "tail --n 30 /var/log/messages.log" at the command prompt and press the "Enter" key. View the command line output and note the lines that include "USB" and note the three letter device name (such as sda) located after the word "device" in the command line output.
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Enter "df --h" at the command line and tap the "Enter" key. Identify the external drive name noted earlier in the "Filesystem" column of the command line output. The remaining device names listed under "Filesystem are associated with internal storage on the computer. Note the "Size" column in the command line output lists the size of each device partition. The "Used" column displays the total amount of storage in use on each storage partition. The "Avail" column presents the total amount of storage available on each storage partition. The "Mounted on" column displays the directory within which each partition can be accessed.
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