4 Ways To Determine The Type Of Drive (HDD or SSD) Installed In Your Computer

4 Ways To Determine The Type Of Drive HDD or SSD Installed In Your Computer4 Ways To Determine The Type Of Drive HDD or SSD Installed In Your Computer

The hard drive is an important component of a computer as it permanently stores all the data that is processed by the CPU. The hard drive is usually the slowest component in the computer but it can be faster if you select the right kind of hard drive.

There are different types of hard drives. The old hard drives were hard disk drives (HDD) which are still abundantly used because they are cheaper compared to other alternatives. The newer kind of hard drives are Solid State Drives (SSD) which are expensive but are a lot faster than HDD.

4 Ways To Determine The Type Of Drive (HDD or SSD) Installed In Your Computer 1Today we will discuss about how to detect which type of hard drive has been installed on your computer. There are quite a few ways of determining the drive type in Windows but we will go through 4 ways of doing so.

Using PowerShell (Command line)

The quickest and easiest way to determine the type of hard drive installed on your computer is using the command line.

  1. Go to Run –> powershell. This will open PowerShell.
  2. Run the following command:
    PowerShell “Get-PhysicalDisk | Format-Table -AutoSize”

    Determine media type using PowerShell
    Determine the media type using PowerShell

You can see the type of hard drive installed under Media Type.

Using the Windows System Information Tool

Windows System Information tool is a wonderful tool for resolving hardware conflicts as well as getting basic level of information about each component of the computer. The System Information Tool is a built in tool in Windows which is available in all versions of Windows including Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10.

Windows System Information Tool

  1. To open the system information tool, go to Run –> msinfo32
  2. A new window will open. You need to expand to Components –> Storage –> Disks from the left hand menu tree
  3. The right hand pane will give you detailed information about each hard drive attached to the system. The information doesn’t have any headings so you’ll need to find out details of each hard drive with care.

Using Drive Optimizer (Disk Defragmentation) Tool

There is another simpler way to check whether your hard drive is HDD or SSD. You just have to open the Drive Optimizer tool in Windows which shows the disk type while listing the drives in the system. In Windows 8, the tool is called Drive Optimizer while it was called Disk Defragmentation Tool in previous versions of Windows.

Optimize Drives

Although this method is simpler, I would recommend the first method as it gives you more details about your system hard drive than the Disk Optimizer tool.

Using Third Party Tools

If you are a tech geek and come across many computers and want to see the hardware details of all the computers especially the drive types, then you should use a third party software. We have already given a list of 6 tools to check detailed information about your computer hardware. You may choose among those tools. Almost all of them will tell you some details about the hard drive.

Speccy

I would recommend Speccy Portable, HWiNFO and PC Wizard for the purpose of determining the hard drive type on your computer.

How do you determine the hard drive type in your computer especially if you are not a Windows user but are using Mac OS or Linux?

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Usman Khurshid is a seasoned IT Pro with over 15 years of experience in the IT industry. He has experience in everything from IT support, helpdesk, sysadmin, network admin, and cloud computing. He is also certified in Microsoft Technologies (MCTS and MCSA) and also Cisco Certified Professional in Routing and Switching.

7 comments

  • Hemal Pandya
    Hemal Pandya

    So once I run msinfo32 and am at Components –> Storage –> Disks and have the details displayed on right how do I determine if I have a SSD or not? These are the labels: Item, Description, Manufacturer, Model, Bytes/Sector, Media Loaded, Media Type, Partitions, SCSI Bus, SCSI Logical Unit, SCSI Port, SCSI Target ID, Sectors/Track, Size, Total Cylinders, Total Sectors, Total Tracks, Tracks/Cylinder, Partition, Partition Size, Partition Starting Offset

  • john

    I have a samsung SV800$H Trying to find what type it is

  • John

    SAMSUNG HM640JJ – so this is HDD. So msinfo32 – good solution

  • Yerty

    “You are” = you’re = “yer” when yer really aggrevated by the no-help genius’ here.

  • Yer stupid
    Yer stupid

    You must be stupid.

    Neither of those actually show whether or not you have an SSD, even in the examples you yourself cited.

    • good with eyes, reading and comprehensions
      good with eyes, reading and comprehensions

      either there is a problem with your eyes or with your brain or incapable of reading or a combination ..

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