Disk & Filesystem Management (Du/Df/Lsblk/Fstrim)

Find out exactly which disk partition is physically sitting on that slow spinning rust

🧩 The Challenge

Dealing with a production database performance issue is bad enough, but it’s even worse when you can’t tell if your mount point is actually sitting on an SSD or a 10-year-old HDD buried in the rack. I’ve spent way too much time guessing hardware topology while a dev screams about latency.

💡 The Fix

Use the block device listing utility to map your filesystem paths directly to the underlying physical hardware and rotation speed. It takes the guesswork out of the physical layout immediately.

lsblk -o NAME,MOUNTPOINT,ROTA,TYPE,SIZE

⚙️ Why It Works

The ROTA column is the real hero here; it shows a 1 if the kernel thinks it’s a rotating disk and a 0 if it’s flash storage. Everything else is just visual noise.

🚀 Pro-Tip: Pipe it into column -t if your output is getting squashed by long device names.

Linux Tips & Tricks | © ngelinux.com | 9/18/2026