Question:How do I determine whether a drive is an HDD or SSD in Windows 8? ?? ??(3 answers) ?? ???Closed 4 years ago. ?
Note: Not a duplicate, for I need an answer for Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, and 10. The solution for 8 and above does not work for Windows 7 or Vista.
I often talk with naive users who have no idea what’s in their system, and less interest, and who use Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, or 10.
Some maintenance processes for the software I support differ if an SSD is installed vs an HDD, i.e., defragmentation. I need a solution which works on every Vista or 7 machine, which means no third party apps, only native Microsoft ‘ware.
Asking the naive user to reboot, go into the BIOS, obtain the drive model, and then search for the drive by model and then parse out if SSD or HDD is too complex, so a suggestion of how to discover in Windows if an SSD is installed in lieu of an HDD is desired.
Use of tools already in Windows is required; third party apps are not viable.
Thank you.
Answer: I would probably have the user run wmic from the start menu then have them type diskdrive get caption
wmic:rootcli>diskdrive get captionCaptionHGST HDN724030ALE640Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GBKingston DataTraveler 2.0 USB Device
“Do any of them say SSD?”
If it’s not obvious, then do the googling you mentioned. ?This is the least intrusive solution to the user, and the easiest to communicate, in my opinion. ?And since this is WMI based you could do it remotely in a domain environment.