If you’re having trouble figuring out which type of drive you have in your computer, there are a few things you can do. First, open the Start menu and search for “disk management.” When the Disk Management window opens, look at the list of drives on the left side. If you see an “HDD” or “SSD” listed, your computer has a traditional hard drive. If you see a “CDROM” or “DVD” listed, your computer has an optical drive. ..
When you have just received a nice computer without hardware documentation, how do you find out what type of drive it has without opening it up? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post provides some quick and easy solutions to help a reader find the information he needs.
Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.
Photo courtesy of Jung-nam Nam (Flickr).
The Question
SuperUser reader Saeed Neamati wants to know if there is an easy way to determine what type of drive his computer has inside:
Is there an easy way to determine what type of drive Saeed’s computer has inside?
The Answer
SuperUser contributors DragonLord and JMK have the answer for us. First up, DragonLord:
Followed by the answer from JMK:
This will generally work in any system where the disks are not plugged into a RAID card. However, if the operating system cannot determine the media type (i.e. the drives are in a hardware RAID setup), the above solution will not work. A program such as CrystalDiskInfo may be able to help in such a situation. If you still cannot tell whether the drive is HDD or SSD, you may need to open the computer case up and examine the actual drive.
Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.
