Storage Device Management

In order to interact with a USB device on a Linux system it first has to be mounted. In order to mount a USB device, one must first identify the device name, and then use the mount command.

Finding a Storage Device Name

USB devices are assigned names when they are connected to a Linux operating system. The first storage device is assigned the name sda (storage device a), the second sdb, the third sdc and so on.

One may use the lsblk to list the detected storage devices for a system, which will output something like this:

NAME    MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
xvda    202:0    1    50G  0 disk
├─xvda1 202:1    1   200M  0 part
├─xvda2 202:2    1     2M  0 part
└─xvda3 202:3    1  49.8G  0 part /
xvdb    202:16   1   1.9T  0 disk /rw
xvdc    202:32   1    10G  0 disk
├─xvdc1 202:33   1     1G  0 part [SWAP]
└─xvdc3 202:35   1     9G  0 part
xvdd    202:48   1 526.8M  1 disk

Then after plugging in the Storage Device run lsblk and look for what's different. In this example, the newly detected storage device is sdb:

NAME    MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sdb       8:16   1  14.5G  0 disk
xvda    202:0    1    50G  0 disk
├─xvda1 202:1    1   200M  0 part
├─xvda2 202:2    1     2M  0 part
└─xvda3 202:3    1  49.8G  0 part /
xvdb    202:16   1   1.9T  0 disk /rw
xvdc    202:32   1    10G  0 disk
├─xvdc1 202:33   1     1G  0 part [SWAP]
└─xvdc3 202:35   1     9G  0 part
xvdd    202:48   1 526.8M  1 disk

Mounting a Storage Device

In order to mount a device, first ensure that the directory you will mount to exists by running:

mkdir -p /media/usb

Then run the following command to mount the storage device:

sudo mount /dev/<usb_device_name> /media/usb