This site seems to have a thing for disk space menu bar apps of late.
Joe even misquoted a well-known saying in a recent post, noting that “you wait ages for one disk usage indicator to arrive, and then two come along at once.”
Well, you better make that 3, buddy!
SpaceView Indicator for Ubuntu
The SpaceView indicator for Ubuntu does exactly what you’d guess: it shows you the exact position of celestial objects in the sky, as they appear from earth.
I’m just kidding.
SpaceView indicator makes it easy to see disk drive information for system drives, memory cards, and USB flash drives from the system tray area, without needing to open Nautilus or another file manager.
You can mark an attached device as a “favorite” to see its usage as a sleek little bar graph embedded in the top bar. To do this you just open the menu and click on an entry.
You can assign a custom name (‘alias’) to each drive to help you know which is which (not that you have to click the ‘restart now’ button for alias changes to be picked up).
You can also customise the colour of the panel icon, and set a threshold past which you see a ‘low space’ warning. Other options include desktop notifications when new devices are connected and auto-startup.
Install SpaceView Indicator on Ubuntu
You can install SpaceView on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.10. Neatly, the indicator also supports Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
Because of the Trusty support we’re going to list apt-get commands instead of the neater (but newer) apt:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vlijm/spaceview
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install spaceview
Alternative
Looking for a disk space indicator but not keen on this one? Check out Indicator Diskman and Udisks Indicator, two similar applets that do a similar job to this, but in slightly different ways.