External media connected via USB

[vasyl-shumskyi]

Is it possible to detect external media connected via USB and process such disks or flash drives separately?

Like so:

{ parts:
   [ { free: 496592740352,
       size: 539028877312,
       place: 'X:',
       letter: 'X:',
       usb: true,
       label: 'My Flash' } ]

Thanks!

[int0h]

For now I can say that it's much harder to implement than labels for parts. Furthermore I need to provide the same functionality for unix based system (and mac-OS) because I'm trying to maintain the project fully cross-platform. Additionally it's harder to test properly (I need to test it on a few platforms with a few device types (flashdrive, external hdd storage etc.)).

I would say I cannot see for now any way of detecting type of a storage without huge overhead (in times both code and performance).

As for me It could be a good idea for the separate project. Let's say media-info which could take a place in terms hdd-space (cross-platform string like: X:, /dev/sda2, etc.) and returns something ilke this:

{
    type: 'flashdrive',
    interface: 'usb',
    filesystem: 'ntfs'
    ...
}

or

{
    type: 'ssd',
    interface: 'SCSI',
    filesystem: 'ext4'
    ...
}

Speaking about your case, I suggest you don't need support of unix based system (surely I can be wrong) thus It'd be much easier for you to implement that logic for the only one platform. https://ardamis.com/2012/08/21/getting-a-list-of-logical-and-physical-drives-from-the-command-line/ here's the article about wmic util (which output is used in hdd-space internally), I hope that will help you.

It's not a final decision and we can discuss it further.

[vasyl-shumskyi]

Unfortunately, I do need USB-detection cross-platform :-]

Earlier i've handled all 3 platforms via and @sindresorhus/df and one of wmic npms. Until discovered you nice cross-platform module. So switched to it.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@sindresorhus/df (linux, darwin)

My first thoughts was to track on *nix platforms via mount-points somehow

 if (process.platform == 'linux')
                return  
                        disk.place.startsWith('/media') || 
                        disk.place.startsWith('/mnt') || 
                        disk.place.startsWith('/mount')

But I'm not pretty sure how to handle this on win32, since place will be just another letter. So declined this solution.

Since I need to find a way to detect USB flash storages mostly and use appropriate icon for them, I thought it would be fine to use same hdd-icon for removable and internal hard drives. But its not always will be quite true to track as flash storage anything with a size < 64G, since there can be smaller partitions on Linux.

Cross-platform drivelist seems to detect flash-storages via system: true/false but its not showing free/used space:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/drivelist

So I believe there should be the way to detect connected interface somehow

Related issues:
Detect a drive type
balena-io-modules/drivelist#64
Removable drive
balena-io-modules/drivelist#18

Thanks for you help!