CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cwindowslinuxsolid-state-drive
StevenWang
StevenWang

Reputation: 3816

How to determine storage type (SSD drive or HHD .mechanical drive), using C language

How can I, from a C program, read the hardware information of a drive? (I.e. to determine if the drive is an SSD or a mechanical disk.)

Upvotes: 4

Views: 8095

Answers (4)

Jeremy Morgan
Jeremy Morgan

Reputation: 3372

You can use the GetDriveType Method from the win32 library, and you might be able to differentiate that way, or you use GetVolumeInformation to try and determine it from the label.

Upvotes: -1

pan1nx
pan1nx

Reputation: 479

SSD are supposed to identify themselves as non-rotative. For linux, as example, you can get the info via sysfs:

cat /sys/block/sda/queue/rotational

If it returns 0, you have SSD...

Upvotes: 17

Windows programmer
Windows programmer

Reputation: 8065

This guess is a long shot but I can't find anything better. In the device's identification structure, see if it supports acoustic management. Old disk drives didn't, but maybe most modern disk drives do. Obviously SSDs don't need acoustic management but let's hope they'll say they don't, instead of pretending to be disk drives.

Upvotes: -2

Simon_Weaver
Simon_Weaver

Reputation: 145890

Have you considered doing a read/write test to try to determine capabilities ?

Upvotes: 1

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