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As you probably know, your computer needs a hard drive installed within it to store things like your documents and photos. And of course, it’s also where the operating system such as Windows is installed as well as your programs. There are also several different types of hard drives you can have in your computer such as the now outdated spinning disk type as well as a solid state drive (SSD). Even with the SSD drives, there are different types such as M.2 and NVMe drives.
If you bought your computer from a store or online shopping site such as Amazon for example, you may not know exactly what type of hard drive your computer has installed within it. In this article, we will be showing you 4 ways to find out what type of hard drive you have in your computer. Each one of these 4 methods will give you similar information, but you may find that one works better than the other, gives you more detailed information, or is easier to do.
Method 1 – Windows Device Manager
The first method we will be using is the Windows Device Manager tool. Device Manager has been around for many versions of Windows and still works the same way. It is used to show you detailed information about the hardware installed in your computer.
You can open Device Manager by searching for it in the taskbar search box. Then you can navigate to the Disk drive section and expand it to see the hard drives installed in your computer. This may be enough detail for you to figure out what type of hard drive you have in your computer and if not, you should be able to see the model of the drive and then do an online search for more details.
Method 2 – Windows Task Manager
The Windows Task Manager is used to manage and monitor your computer’s performance. It lets you view and control running applications, processes, and services. You can check CPU, memory, disk usage, and network activity. It’s also handy for force-quitting unresponsive programs, changing process priorities, and analyzing system performance to troubleshoot any issues.
If you were to go to the Performance section of Task Manager and select your hard drive, you would then see an area labeled Type in the lower right hand corner which will then tell you what type of hard drive you have installed in your computer. If you have more than one had drive, you can click on each one to see what type of drive it is.
Method 3 – Windows PowerShell
Windows PowerShell is a tool from Microsoft used to automate tasks and manage systems. It combines a command-line shell and a scripting language, allowing users to do things like manage files, control applications, and monitor systems. It’s popular with IT professionals for managing Windows environments and automating repetitive tasks.
There is a command you can run that will show you the name, serial number and type of drive for all the drives installed in your computer. Simply open a PowerShell window and type the following text (or copy and paste it from below).
Get-PhysicalDisk | Select FriendlyName, SerialNumber, MediaType, BusType
As you can see in the image below, it found two hard drives plus one USB flash drive and for the hard drives, it shows SSD as the type even though one of them is an NVMe drive which is still a type of SSD drive. So if you want information about external drives, they will show up as well.
Method 4 – Using the Windows Settings App
The final method we will be discussing to find what type of hard drive you have in your computer is by opening the Windows Settings app.
Once you have the Settings app open, you will then need to go to System and then Storage. Then under Advanced storage settings, you will see a section labeled Disks & Volumes.
Once you are in the Disks & volume section, you will see your hard drives and you can then click on the Properties button next to any one of them to see more details and to show what type of hard drive it is.
As you can see in the image below, it shows the name, model and capacity of the drive as well as what type of hard drive it is.
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