Ade Malsasa Akbar contact
Senior author, Open Source enthusiast.
Wednesday, November 26, 2025 at 21:26

Disks - An Intro to Ubuntu Default Disk Utility Application


Disks, or GNOME Disk Utility, is the Ubuntu default disk storage management application. Its purpose is to manage everything about hard disk drives and other storage on your Ubuntu computer -- including optical discs (CDs, DVDs) and USB flash drives. That means you can alter the filesystem inside that disk (create, remove, resize, and rename it), format the disk (to MBR or GPT), make a backup, as well as write an ISO image to that disk, and do other useful things such as benchmarks and more configurations. 

 


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Logo




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Original Logo


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Screenshots

 
Click to enlarge picture.






(a)

(b)

(c)



(d)

(e)

(f)

 

Where:
 

(a) Disks default appearance. 

(b) Disks showing internal hard disk drive of a laptop.

(c) Disks showing options of a select hard disk drive. Visible here "Format Disk", "Create Disk Image", "Restore Disk Image", and more.

(d) Disks showing options of a select partition and contents of the gear button. Visible here "Format partition", "Edit partition", "Edit filesystem", and more.
    
(e) Disks showing results of a hard disk benchmark. Visible here average read & write rates represented with blue and red graphs. 
    
(f) Disks showing two dialogs of "Format Disk" and "Restore Image". 


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Description


Disks (GNOME Disk Utility) is the default disk management application on Ubuntu. It has a clean, consistent, and simple user interface with a left panel to show a list of disks and a right panel to show the details of a selected disk. Its purpose is to manage and change disk storage on an Ubuntu computer. That includes formatting the disks, manipulating filesystems on them, configuring various things such as automatic mounting, making backups and restoring, as well as benchmarking them. Furthermore, its purpose can be extended by combining it with the LiveCD ability of Ubuntu: Disks can also manage disk storage from other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Apple MacOS, even if those systems are present on other computers. Disks is an application originating from the GNOME Applications by The GNOME Project.


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Purposes


1. View all disk storage on an Ubuntu computer, including:

  • Hard disk drive (HDD)
  • USB Flash Disk Drive (FDD)
  • CD Drive
  • DVD Drive
  • Solid State Drive (SSD)


2. Read detailed information from a disk or a filesystem, such as: 

  • partition table (MBR or GPT), 
  • unique identity (UUID), 
  • type (EXT4, ReiserFS, Btrfs, FAT32, or NTFS), 
  • size in GB, 
  • and much more.


3. Formatting the disk with a partition table of choice:

  • Master Boot Record (MBR), or
  • GUID Partition Table (GPT)


4. Manipulate the filesystem inside a disk, including:

  • Creating
  • Removing
  • Resizing
  • Renaming
  • Reformatting the filesystem type (EXT4, FAT, etc.)


5. Imaging the disk, meaning two ways of:

  • Making a backup of the whole disk drive, resulting in an ISO image, and
  • Restoring a backup to a disk drive, and this also means
    • Writing an ISO Image file onto a disk drive to make a bootable medium


6. Making various configurations, including:

  • Shutting down a hard disk drive.
  • Enabling automatic mounting to a certain disk drive.
  • Making a certain disk drive read-only or fully writable.


7. Benchmarking a hard disk or a solid state drive (SSD), resulting in a chart and table of detailed information.

8. Testing the health of a hard disk drive via SMART data and self-test.

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How To Run Disks


1. Click Ubuntu menu button.

2. Type "disks".

3. Click Disks logo.

4. The application runs. Done. 

 


 

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How To Use Disks

 

This application has a lot of use. We picked here four (4) of them from A to D:

 

A. Viewing a detailed information of a hard disk drive (HDD).

1. Run Disks.

2. Select a disk drive from the left panel.

3. Full information is viewed on the right panel in form of a table. Done.

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B. Formatting a USB flash disk drive. 

1. Plug your USB flash disk drive into a USB port.

2. Disks will detect and show it on the left panel. For example, "SanDisk CruzerBlade."

3. Select it.

4. Click the three-line button to the top > Format... > select MBR/MSDOS option > OK. Done.

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C. Viewing a health measurement of a disk.

1. Select a disk from the left panel.

2. Click the three-line button to the top > SMART Data & Self-tests... >

3. Click Start > Short > type your password > wait for the process to take place. 

4. When finished, it will show a message "Last self-test completed successfully". Done.

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D. Benchmarking a disk.

1. Do the same like point C, but select Benchmark Disk... option instead.

2. Click Start Benchmark.

3. Click Start Benchmarking.

4. Type your password.

5. Wait for the process to take place.

6. While finished, a chart with detailed information will be shown. Done.

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Commands and Integration with Ubuntu Desktop



Disks can be launched via command line:

$ gnome-disks
 

Disks can also be called from Files (Ubuntu file manager) in several ways: 

1. Right-click an ISO image file -> Open with Disk Image Mounter. 

(This gives you similar functionality to popular but proprietary programs Daemon Tools and UltraISO.)



 

2.  Right-click an ISO image file -> Open with -> Disk Image Writer. 

(This gives you similar functionality to popular but proprietary programs Nero Burning [to CD/DVD] as well as AOMEI or UltraISO [to USB])


 

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Location on the Screen and System


1. Disks can be found on Ubuntu applications menu.

2. Disks can also be found on Files (Ubuntu file manager) as mentioned above. 

 

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Documentation and User Manual for Disks


Press F1 when running GNOME Disks. This will open Ubuntu Desktop Guide , the documentation and user manual for Ubuntu users, to the chapter of Disks showing a selection of more chapters related to disks and filesystems. 


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Similar Programs



KDE Partition Manager - the default disk management application on Kubuntu.

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Contributing to GNOME Disks


Disks is part of GNOME. So, you can contribute to Disks just like how you contribute to other GNOME applications. You can do many things to participate such as make a donation to help fund the project, or help translate Disks to your language, or if you are a programmer, help improving its source code, or simply reporting a bug to the project is considered a contribution and many more. Programmatically, Disks is written in C and Rust languages with GTK libraries by using (optionally) GNOME Builder code editor. Finally, your contribution to Disks will benefit GNOME, Ubuntu and other GNU/Linux projects as well. To start participating, feel free to see Disks's Official Webpage from References section below.

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