GNOME Disks
Built-in disk tool. Checks drive health, formats USB sticks, writes images and shows what is on each drive.
Our verdict
GNOME Disks is the answer to "where did CrystalDiskInfo go". It is already on the machine on most beginner Linux systems, usually listed just as Disks, and it covers the everyday drive jobs in one window.
Pick a drive on the left and you see its partitions, how full they are and what they are used for. The menu in the corner has the health check, which reads the drive's own record of errors, reallocated sectors and hours powered on, and tells you whether the disk thinks it is healthy. The same menu formats a USB stick or writes an image file onto one.
It is a check-when-you-remember tool rather than a watchdog. Nothing sits in the tray warning you that a disk is going bad. If you had CrystalDiskInfo set to nag you, put a reminder in your calendar instead.
What's good
- Already installed on Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint and most other beginner systems
- Reads the drive's own health report, so you can see a failing disk before it dies
- Formats USB sticks and memory cards and writes image files to them
- Has a speed test, so you can check whether a drive has slowed down
What to know first
- There is no warning system, so you have to remember to open it and look
- The health report is raw drive data with short labels, not a plain English verdict
- It is part of the GNOME desktop, so on a KDE system you get a different tool with a different layout
The details
- Cost
- Free
- Open source
- Yes (GPL-2.0-or-later)
- How you install it
- Built-in app store
Windows apps it can replace
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