How to Check If Your Hard Drive Is SSD or HDD

 If you recently bought a new computer or hard drive, you might be wondering if your hard drive is an SSD drive or a standard HDD.

Before we begin, let's look at the differences between the two drives.

HDD is short for Hard Disk Drive. You could almost call them old school nowadays. They contain platters and a moving actuator arm that can read and write data to the platter surface. This is why you can hear an HDD making noise. They tend to be slow and require defragmentation regularly to optimize where data is placed. All hard drives fail sooner or later because they have moving parts.

SSD is short for Solid State Drive. They use integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data persistently and are much faster than the traditional HDD. Computer boot times of 10 seconds or less is not uncommon. When SanDisk released their 20Mb SSD drive in 1991, the cost was $1,000. SSD drives used to be so expensive in modern times that many people would purchase a smaller (128MB for example) SSD just to run their operating system and favorite programs. SSD drives became larger and more affordable in 2018 with 1TB drives costing only $100. SSD drives do not need defragmentation but instead use TRIM which tells the SSD drive which data blocks it can erase because they are no longer in use. TRIM can prolong the SSD lifespan and performance. The jury is still out on how long SSD drives last, but we've had the same drives in use for a few years.

Here's how to tell what type of hard drive you have.

1: Using Disk Defragmentor

Press the Windows Key + S and type in defrag, then click on Defragment & Optimize Drives.

As mentioned, we don't need to defrag SSD drives, but we're just looking for Solid State Drive or Hard Disk Drive.

2: Using PowerShell

Open PowerShell or the Command Prompt and type in PowerShell "Get-PhysicalDisk | Format-Table -AutoSize".

3: Using Freeware Apps

There are so many freeware system information apps available; it can be hard to pick one.

We've always liked Belarc Advisor, but you might also consider HWiNFO, HiBit System Information, and SIV (System Information Viewer).