hdparm is a command-line utility to control ATA controllers and disk drives. It can increase performance and/or reliability by careful tuning of hardware settings like power and acoustic management, DMA modes, and caching. It can also display detailed device information, or be used as a simple performance benchmarking tool.

hdparm provides a command line interface to various Linux kernel interfaces provided by the SATA/ATA/SAS libata subsystem, and the older IDE driver subsystem. Many external USB drive enclosures with SCSI-ATA Command Translation (SAT) are also supported.

Gpart tries to guess the partitions on a PC-style, MBR-partitioned disk after they have been inadvertently deleted or the primary partition table at sector 0 damaged. In both cases, the contents of these partitions still exist on the disk but the operating system cannot access them.

Gpart ignores the partition table and scans each sector of the device or image file for several known file system and partition types. Only partitions which have been formatted in some way can be recognized. Several file system guessing modules are built in; more can be written and loaded at run time.

The guessed table can be restored manually, for example with fdisk, written to a file, or---if you firmly believe it's entirely correct---directly to disk.

It should be stressed that gpart does a very heuristic job. It can easily be right in its guesswork but it can also be terribly wrong. Never believe its output without any plausibility checks.

Idle3-tools provides a utility to get, set, or disable the Idle3 timer present in many Western Digital hard drives. This timer is part of the "IntelliPark" feature that stops the disk when not in use. Unfortunately, the default timer setting is not well suited to Linux or other *nix systems, and can dramatically shorten the lifespan of the drive if left unchecked.

Gdu is a disk usage analyzer written in Go. It is intended primarily for SSD disks where it can fully utilize parallel processing, but it also works on HDDs.

fff (fast file-manager) is a simple, blazing fast and minimal file manager for Linux, written in bash. It only requires bash and coreutils, and its highly optimized now for efficient performance.

This software supports RAID device discovery, RAID set activation, creation, removal, rebuild and display of properties for ATARAID/DDF1 metadata.

dmraid uses libdevmapper and the device-mapper kernel runtime to create devices with respective mappings for the ATARAID sets discovered.

This package provides the host tools for controlling a Greaseweazle: an Open Source USB device capable of reading and writing raw data on nearly any type of floppy disk

All-singing, all-dancing, fully colourised df clone written in Python. It displays the amount of disk space available on the mounted file systems, using different colours for different types of file systems. Output format is completely customizable.

The Open iSCSI project is a high-performance, transport independent, multi-platform implementation of RFC3720 iSCSI.

Features:

• highly optimized and very small-footprint data path

• persistent configuration database

• SendTargets discovery

• provides CHAP support

• PDU header Digest

• multiple sessions

nwipe securely erases disks using a variety of methods to ensure the data cannot be recovered. It can wipe multiple drives in parallel and can be used noninteractively or with a text-based user interface.

GNU Parted is a package for creating and manipulating disk partition tables. It includes a library and command-line utility.

libblockdev is a C library supporting GObject introspection for manipulation of block devices. It has a plugin-based architecture where each technology (like LVM, Btrfs, MD RAID, Swap...) is implemented in a separate plugin, possibly with multiple implementations (e.g. using LVM CLI or the new LVM D-Bus API).

This package provides a partial implementation of iSNS, specified by RFC4171. It's an maintained fork of https://github.com/cleech/open-isns.

TestDisk is primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms were caused by faulty software or human error (such as accidentally deleting a partition table). TestDisk can:

1. Fix partition table, recover deleted partition

2. Recover FAT32 boot sector from its backup

3. Rebuild FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 boot sector

4. Fix FAT tables

5. Rebuild NTFS boot sector

6. Recover NTFS boot sector from its backup

7. Fix MFT using MFT mirror

8. Locate ext2/ext3/ext4 Backup SuperBlock

9. Un-delete files from FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext2 file systems

10. Copy files from deleted FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3/ext4 partitions.

This package also includes the photorec command, described below.

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from hard disks, CD-ROMs, and lost pictures (thus the Photo Recovery name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the file system and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media's file system has been severely damaged or reformatted. It can recover lost files from at least:

1. FAT

2. NTFS

3. exFAT

4. ext2/ext3/ext4 file system

5. HFS+

This package provides a statically-linked fsck.fat and a fsck.vfat compatibility symlink for use in an initrd.

XFE (X File Explorer) is a file manager for X. It is based on the popular but discontinued, X Win Commander. It aims to be the file manager of choice for all light thinking Unix addicts!

Duc maintains a database of accumulated sizes of directories of the file system, and allows you to query this database with some tools, or create fancy graphs showing you where your bytes are.

Duc comes with console utilities, ncurses and X11 user interfaces and a CGI wrapper for disk usage querying and visualisation.

This package contains user-space utilities to create and inspect bcache partitions. It's rather minimal as bcache is designed to work well without configuration on any system.

Linux's bcache lets one or more fast block devices, such as flash-based SSDs, to act as a cache for one or more slower (and inexpensive) devices, such as hard disk drives or redundant storage arrays. In fact, bcache intends to be a superior alternative to battery-backed RAID controllers.

Bcache is designed around the performance characteristics of SSDs and tries to minimize write inflation. It's file-system agnostic and does both write-through and write-back caching.

This package provides parted bindings for Python.

hddtemp is a small utility that gives you the temperature of your hard drive by reading S.M.A.R.T. information (for drives that support this feature).

This package provides a tool to resize FAT partitions using libparted.

udevil is a command line program that mounts and unmounts removable devices without a password, shows device info, and monitors device changes. It can also mount ISO files, NFS, SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDAV URLs, and tmpfs/ramfs filesystems.

This package provides a utility library for managing the libnvdimm (non-volatile memory device) sub-system in the Linux kernel.

The dosfstools package includes the mkfs.fat and fsck.fat utilities, which respectively make and check MS-DOS FAT file systems.