How to Detect an SSD drive?

How to tell an solid-state drive drive (SSD) from a hard disk drive?

I have a Dell Inspiron 910 Mini notebook, and the drive is SSD, but I did not get info from the OS that mark the drive is SSD.

Does anyone know how to detect an SSD drive, and any Windows API can get it?

Any suggestion?

open up the notebook and have a look?

Did you really want to know this programatically? Or just for your own information?

Not sure about API calls, there probably isn;t one that spoecifically calls out "SSD", but there may be some clues in the drive info it returns. I don;t have an SSD so I can't investigate that.

But if it's FYI, the Device Manager will have the exact name/model of the "Disk Drive" which you can then look up on line. Also if you run a third party disk performance utility you will probably see sub millisecond seek times.

The Dell Mini 9 uses a PCI-e SSD. It does not support conventional hard drives nor SATA SSDs. If it is stock from the factory, it is made by STEC, Inc.

fseal said:

Did you really want to know this programatically? Or just for your own information?

Not sure about API calls, there probably isn;t one that spoecifically calls out "SSD", but there may be some clues in the drive info it returns. I don;t have an SSD so I can't investigate that.

But if it's FYI, the Device Manager will have the exact name/model of the "Disk Drive" which you can then look up on line. Also if you run a third party disk performance utility you will probably see sub millisecond seek times.

I would better from program.

But I still do not find any info from drive dtails.
(“Computer Management” -> “Device Manager” -> “Disk Drives” -> Right click the drive and choose “Properties” -> “Details”)

wangchangqiu said:

I would better from program.

But I still do not find any info from drive dtails.
(“Computer Management” -> “Device Manager” -> “Disk Drives” -> Right click the drive and choose “Properties” -> “Details”)

Yeah, I'm not sure there is anything concrete that tells you what kind of drive it is. I meant just copy the drive name and paste it into google and look up information about it :)

As far as the API goes. You can query for all that information that is in the device manager, but basically Windows likely doesn't know itself. It's just another drive to it. It might be better if id DID know, then it could automatically tweak itself for better use of the SSD. (I.e. no disk defrag or a different mode that worked better)

"Will disk defragmentation be disabled by default on SSDs?
Yes. The automatic scheduling of defragmentation will exclude partitions on devices that declare themselves as SSDs. Additionally, if the system disk has random read performance characteristics above the threshold of 8 MB/sec, then it too will be excluded. The threshold was determined by internal analysis."
Quate from Engineering Windows 7(Engineering Windows 7 : Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives)


It seems now Microsoft do not know how to dectect SSD becuase few SSD identify themselves as SSD.


Microsoft uses another way to detect SSD from random read threshold.