How to determine storage type (SSD drive or HHD .m

Question

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.)

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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...

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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