How to find out the condition and health of a hard drive, how to look at SMART readings (HDD, SSD) and estimate how long the drive will last
Modern hard drives come in two types: HDD and SSD. Let's first look at these two types. If you talk about them in simple and understandable language, you will get the following. An HDD is a familiar box containing round magnetized plates. They store information and read heads that read this information. The spindles in this device spin the disks up to several thousand revolutions per minute. The most common speeds are 5400 and 7200 rpm.
An SSD or solid-state drive is, simply put, a large flash drive, but with incredibly high read and write speeds, and the larger the file size, the more significant the difference between an SSD and a regular hard drive becomes. Any program installed on an SSD drive starts several times faster, as almost everyone already knows. But how can an ordinary user find out which disk is installed in his computer?
Three ways to find out which hard drive is installed
There are three common ways to find out which disk is installed in your computer (ssd or hdd): using Windows tools, software, or disassembling the computer.
First - Using Windows Tools
The easiest and most up-to-date way to determine the type of hard drive is using Windows tools. You need to hold down the Win + R keys. In the window that appears, enter the combination “mmc devmgmt.msc”. The combination is written without quotes, after writing the combination, you need to press the OK button.
Next, you will have an open device manager; this combination works on all Windows operating systems. In the Device Manager that appears, find the disk devices button. Open and look at the name of your disk.
As a result, you will get the full name of your disk. You will need to enter this information in any search engine. Most often, this panel contains only one disk device, but if you have two, you need to enter each name separately. Any search engine by name will give you the characteristics of the disk and other information about your device.
This method is the simplest and most accessible for every user. But there is also a second way that will help you find out what kind of drive you have using special applications and programs.
The second is to determine the hard drive type using AIDA64
The most common program that will help you find out which hard drive is installed is AIDA64. The program can be downloaded absolutely free from the Internet. It is convenient, provides a huge amount of useful information for almost your entire system and has a very simple and user-friendly interface. In addition, the program not only provides information about your hard drive, but also provides complete characteristics of your entire machine. Working with it is very easy and simple; in order to find out what kind of disk you have, you need to:
Launch the AIDA64 application.
Go to the data storage tab, and then select the ATA tab. It is this tab that will be responsible for all the information about your hard drive, its values, properties, device type and much more.
In addition, this application will help you understand and find out the characteristics of other devices, information about your computer, and also improve the quality and performance of your operating system.
Download AIDA64— https://www.aida64.com/downloads
The third way is visual
And the last way by which you can find out which disk is installed on your computer is to disassemble the PC. Open the computer lid and find the hard drive. As written above, a hard drive is a box that contains magnetic plates. Most often, the hard drive is located in a separate “area” allocated for this device. After which we need to get to the hard drive and read information about it. A regular HDD looks like this:
But if you have an SSD, it will look a little different, resembling a large flash drive
At the same time, you can always read information on the hard drive and find out its data.
As you can see, there are quite a few ways to find out what hard drive is on your computer. Each method is interesting, convenient and simple in its own way. In addition to these methods, there are other options, but they are less practical and convenient, especially for ordinary users. Each owner of his personal computer must know what kind of hard drive he has and distinguish an SSD drive from an HDD drive.
What is a hard drive?
HDD (Hard Disk Drive), hard drive, screw, hard disk, hard - here is a small list of words by which it is called. This is a device that constantly records information and has a rewrite function.
It stores all information, including the operating system. It is on it that you install, write and overwrite all files on the computer.
How to see the hard drive?
If you enter My computer, then you will see local disks - this is the hard drive. More precisely, this is a little wrong. If you have one local drive, this may also mean that it is a hard drive. But if you have more than one local one, this does not mean at all that you have the same number of hard drives. The hard drive was simply divided into .
Well, externally the hard drive looks like this:
What types of hard drives are there?
They are primarily divided into External And Domestic.
External hard drive- This portable, portable hard drive, enclosed in a special box for easy transportation:
They differ in both volume and connection interface. If the first point is clear, then they have the same connection interface - USB. But now more and more are being released with the USB 3.0 interface, which is several times faster (claimed to be 10 times, but in reality less) than the outdated 2.0. 3.0 is distinguished by its blue connector.
Internal hard drive- this is the one that is on the computer. Everything is logical. Internal HDDs (hard drives) are divided into PCs (Personal Computers) and laptops.
The difference between them is mainly in size.
For a PC it is 3.55 inches, for a laptop it is 2.5 inches.
There is also 1.8, but more on that below.
Hard drive device.
Information in the hard drive is recorded on special magnetic disks. If you remove the cover by unscrewing the bolts, you will see the following picture:
These round pieces are magnetic disks on which information is located. It is read by a special spindle located on top.
Nowadays they are increasingly producing railways using a different technology - using a circuit board. Such disks are more durable both in terms of operation and in the event of mechanical damage (after all, they have no moving elements) and have higher read and write speeds. Other advantages include: noiselessness, thermal properties, low energy consumption, weight and size. They have a name solid state SSD drives and have a form factor of 1.8 inches.
There are both internal:
and external ones:
Such disks (internal) are used to install the operating system on them. This is the right approach. From them it will load much faster, and all processes of copying, recording, installation and other work in general will also be faster compared to a regular hard drive.
Of the minuses, two main factors can be identified - the price (from $200 to $800) and the amount of memory. There are no terabyte SSDs available yet. And the price directly depends on the volume. Well, you don’t need much for the OS.
But now they are starting to release new versions of railways that have received all the best from others - this hybrid hard drives:
They allow you to perform operations just as quickly, but have a large amount of memory and a relatively low price (500 GB magnetic disk + 60 GB SSD flash memory = $350).
How can I find out what hard drive is installed on my computer?
Go to Device Manager and look.
RMB on My Computer - Properties - Device Manager
What are the characteristics of a hard drive? How to choose a hard drive?
When choosing a railway, you need to pay attention to the following indicators:
Interface- this is the connection and connectors. There are SATA and IDE. The former are more common, the latter are already becoming a thing of the past. SATA comes in different speeds: SATA I (up to 1.5 Gbit/s), SATA II (up to 3 Gbit/s), SATA III (up to 6 Gbit/s). When choosing, you need to know what connectors you have on your motherboard, so that there is no confusion later. You can read about this in the article.
Volume- how much memory will be contained in your disk. Here you should proceed from your preferences and look forward, because very often there is simply not enough memory and you have to delete something. I recommend reading the article that describes disk space. so that later they would not be surprised that they bought a 500 GB disk, but in fact it turned out to be 465 GB.
A good option would be to take 2-3 hard drives with a capacity of 500 GB. - 1 TB. Or one for 2 TB. , but here it should be taken into account that if it breaks, then not only the OS will fail, but also absolutely all the data on all local disks.
If you have several hard drives, this problem can be avoided.
Speed- gaining access to information. It is obtained by rotating its magnetic disks. This scale ranges from 4.5 thousand revolutions per minute to 10 thousand. The lower this figure, the less the disk will make noise, consume energy, generate heat, and reduce the speed of obtaining information. Usually they choose 5400 and 7200. These types of drives are still popular.
For storing information, you can choose 5400, and for the OS and programs - 7200.
Manufacturer- a company that produces railways. There is a lot of controversy here. I personally believe that any manufacturer has a defect rate. It’s just that some have more, and some have less. The most popular hard drive manufacturers to this day are Western Digital, Seagate and Hitachi.
There are few cases when you need to find out the model of your hard drive. Most often, a similar question is asked when the hard drive has died for a long time - errors appear during operation, or the OS does not boot at all due to a non-working disk. It happens that you need to identify your HDD in order to replace it with a more capacious one, or this information is simply interesting for you.
In any case, problems with the hard drive are those that can be fixed in workshops, since computer repair at home is advisable only when the problem can be fixed quickly and efficiently. Diagnosing HDD faults takes a long time, which means you can only quickly replace the problem disk with a new one.
The most primitive way to find out your hard drive is to remove it from the system unit or laptop case. To do this, turn off the power (remove the laptop battery), unscrew the system unit (or the bottom cover on the bottom of the laptop) and take out our HDD, on which all the information of interest will be visible - manufacturer, volume, speed, country of manufacture and other parameters.
If you have no desire to disassemble your laptop or unwind the system unit, then we can find out all the information you need using the software method.
How to find out the real size of your hard drive
For a better understanding, manufacturers and sellers indicate the traditional disk capacity: 40, 60, 120, 160, 320, 500, 640 GB and so on. However, in reality it is always less than stated, because:
1 GB = 1024 MB
1 MB = 1024 KB
1 KB = 1024 bytes
and manufacturers round up to 1000 when making calculations. Below is a table of correspondence between the labeled HDD volume and the real one.
| Storage capacity | Total, bytes (rounded) | Real volume |
|---|---|---|
| 40 GB | 40,000,000,000 | 37.25 GB |
| 60 GB | 60,000,000,000 | 55.88 GB |
| 80 GB | 80,000,000,000 | 74.51 GB |
| 100 GB | 100,000,000,000 | 93.13 GB |
| 120 GB | 120,000,000,000 | 111.76 GB |
| 160 GB | 160,000,000,000 | 149.01 GB |
| 200 GB | 200,000,000,000 | 186.26 GB |
| 250 GB | 250,000,000,000 | 232.83 GB |
| 320 GB | 320,000,000,000 | 298.02 GB |
| 400 GB | 400,000,000,000 | 372.52 GB |
| 500 GB | 500,000,000,000 | 465.65 GB |
| 640 GB | 640,000,000,000 | 595.84 GB |
To verify this, right-click on the shortcut My computer and select Control. In the utility that opens, go to the tab Storage devices - Disk management
In our case, the utility shows 465.65 GB, which corresponds to the 500 GB marking.
How to find out your hard drive model
As in the previous method, right-click on the shortcut My computer and select Control. In the computer management utility that opens, open the tab device Manager. Expand here Disk devices and you will see the hard drives installed on your computer.
In our case, there are two of them - Hitachi HTS545050A7E380 and SanDisk SSD i100 24 GB. The first is a traditional HDD, the second is a solid-state SSD drive.
How to find out all the information about your hard drive
To the program AIDA64 we already asked for help when we were looking for, etc. This utility will help us this time too.
You can familiarize yourself with the AIDA64 program and download it for free from our website.
Launch AIDA on your computer and go through the tabs Data Storage - ATA. At the top of the window, select the desired hard drive, if there are several of them, and the program will show all the information about the hard drive. The report is divided into parts, the information we need is entitled as ATA Device Properties And Device Physical Data.
As you can see, everything is elementary and absolutely simple if you know what tools to use to find information.
Hard drive capacity is one of the critical parameters of a computer. Sometimes the time comes to replace storage media. The decisive characteristic for making such a decision is the size of the hard drive.
- To quickly take a look at your PC's available storage capacity, open File Explorer and click This PC. Follow these steps:
- Press Win + E.
- A File Explorer window will open.
- Select "this PC" from the items listed on the left side of the window.
- You see an overview of all hard drives and their partitions used in this PC.
- PC Storage Review.
2. At a glance, you can determine the storage capacity of your PC. The blue part of the thermometer shows the part of the disk being used; the gray part represents the available space.
3. When the available space becomes too low, the thermometer turns red, which helps you quickly identify low capacity hard drives. You must respond to this situation in some way if you want to continue using the drive.
4. For more information about your hard drive partition, right-click the drive and select Properties. The Storage Properties dialog box appears. The General tab shows detailed information about the used and free space of the drive, as shown here.
5. When free space drops below 10 percent, Windows displays a free capacity warning. If you see this message, act immediately. Look for what part of your existing content you can safely delete or transfer to other media.
6. You can also find out the data we are interested in without starting the operating system. The necessary information is available in the BIOS. To find out, turn on the power of the computer, and during the startup process, hold down the key to enter the BIOS (this can be del, or F10, depending on the motherboard model). You will go to the menu. I use the arrow and Tab keys to navigate through the tabs and find the IDE menu. Select the hard drive you are interested in (there can only be one) and press the enter key. A window will open with the characteristics of the media, including its capacity.
7. In addition, you can use special diagnostic utilities that provide complete information about a particular type of equipment. For our task, something like HDD Life is suitable. After installing and launching the program, you will see a window with detailed information about the status, characteristics and condition of your hard drives.
Video: Find out the amount of RAM, video memory and hard drive size
There are many situations when a computer user needs to obtain information about installed hard drives. This can be done in various ways - using the operating system, using third-party applications, and without all this. Let's consider the issue in more detail.
Windows operating systems provide all the necessary tools for obtaining various information about the hard drive. Let's start with the simplest.
device Manager
The Device Manager application displays a list of all devices built into the motherboard and externally connected to the computer, including hard drives. Using this system program, you can quickly find out the model of the installed hard drive, which will subsequently allow you to obtain more detailed information about it:
- To launch Device Manager, right-click on the My Computer or This PC icon and select Properties. In the upper left corner of the window that opens, find and click on the “Device Manager” element.
- A list with different categories of devices will be displayed on the screen. We are interested in the "Disk devices" section. Open it up.
- After the last action, the names of the models of hard drives connected to the computer will be displayed on the screen.
To get all the other information about your hard drive, simply enter its model name into the search bar of any search engine. The very first lines of the search result will contain links where you can get detailed information on a particular hard drive model.
System application "Computer Management"
Using the "Computer Management" system application, you can determine not only the name of the hard drive, but also its total volume, number and name of partitions (local drives):
- Open Control Panel from the Start menu or another method.
- Go to the "System and Security" subsection, then click on the "Administration" element.
- A new window will open with a list of system utilities. Find among them and launch the Computer Management application.
- Another window will open. On the left side, expand the “Storage Devices” section, then click on the “Disk Management” item. It should look like this:
- The lower part of the window will display the hard drive numbers ("Disk 0", "Disk 1", "Disk 2", etc.) and the partitions on it. The image above shows information about two hard drives.
- To find out the model of the presented hard drive, you need to right-click on its name in the system (for example, “Disk 0”), then select “Properties”. A small window will open. The "General" tab will display the model name of the selected hard drive.
Command line
In some situations, it is impossible to determine the hard drive model using the two previous methods. This is usually observed when there are viruses on the computer or when some system services responsible for the operation of these applications are disabled. In such cases, the Windows command line (console) can help:
- To open the Windows console, press the "Win+R" keys simultaneously, then type "cmd" into the window and press "Enter".
- Next, enter the command “wmic” into the console window and press enter.
- Then again enter “diskdrive list brief” into the command line, press “Enter”.
- A small list will be displayed on the screen:
- In the "Caption" column you can find out the name of the hard drive models.
- If you need to clarify the total capacity of the hard drive in gigabytes, then the number (number of bytes) from the “Size” column should be divided 3 times by 1024. For example, the disk “ST3160215AS” has a capacity of 160039272960 bytes, i.e. 160039272960/1024/1024/1024 = 149.04 GB.
Programs for identifying hard drives
On the Internet you can find a lot of applications that allow you to obtain a wide variety of information about hard drives, including data about it that is difficult or even impossible to obtain using the operating system. One such program is Ontrack EasyRecovery. In general, the program is designed to recover lost data from a hard drive, but with its help you can get quite detailed information.
- Open the Ontrack EasyRecovery application. On the first page, click on the “Continue” button.
- On the next page of the program, select the “Hard Disk” item and click on the “Continue” button again.
- The “Disks and volumes found” table will be displayed on the screen, in which you can see the hard drive model and the partitions present on it.
- Right-click on the name of the hard drive, then select "Disk Information".
- A new window will open containing all the important data about the hard drive. For example:
Find out the hard drive model in BIOS
If your computer does not have an operating system or for some reason has stopped working properly, you can find out the hard drive model. This firmware is built into the PC motherboard, so it can work without any OS. To obtain the hard drive model using this method, follow the instructions:
- Turn off your computer.
- Turn on the PC again and immediately press the “F2” or “Delete” key. The BIOS user interface should appear on the computer screen. If this does not happen, you may need to press another key (you can check on the motherboard manufacturer's website).
- The name of the hard drive model can be listed in the first tab of the BIOS interface. For example:
- If the necessary information is not on the main page, then you should look for it in the “Boot”, “Advanced” or other tab. Just go through all the tabs of the BIOS interface.
You can also find out which hard drive is on your computer by inspecting its case. Any hard drive has a sticker that indicates the model name, volume, serial number and other information.
