I want to know whether a disk is a solid-state drive or hard disk.
lshw is not installed. I do yum install lshw and it says there is no package named lshw. I do not know which version of http://pkgs.repoforge.org/lshw/ is suitable for my CentOS.
I search the net and there is nothing that explain how to know whether a drive is SSD or HDD. Should I just format them first?
Result of fdisk -l:
Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00074f7d Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 1 14 103424 83 Linux Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/sda2 14 536 4194304 82 Linux swap / Solaris Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/sda3 536 14594 112921600 83 Linux Disk /dev/sdc: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Disk /dev/sdb: 128.0 GB, 128035676160 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 15566 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Disk /dev/sdd: 480.1 GB, 480103981056 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 58369 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Answers:
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Method 1
Linux automatically detects SSD, and since kernel version 2.6.29, you may verify sda with:
cat /sys/block/sda/queue/rotational
You should get 1 for hard disks and 0 for a SSD.
It will probably not work if your disk is a logical device emulated by hardware (like a RAID controller).
See this answer for more information about SSD partitioning, filesystem…
Method 2
With lsblk (part of the util-linux package):
lsblk -d -o name,rota
NAME ROTA sda 0 sdb 0 sdc 1
where ROTA means rotational device (1 if true, 0 if false)
Method 3
Use smartctl (install by installing smartmontools) to retrieve vendor information,
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdb
If you see a line like this,
Rotation Rate: Solid State Device
That would be a SSD drive.
Method 4
I needed to do this on the VPS and none of the provided solutions worked for me, but this answer did the trick:
This just reads random data from the drive and assesses the time.
time for i in `seq 1 1000`; do
dd bs=4k if=/dev/sda count=1 skip=$(( $RANDOM * 128 )) >/dev/null 2>&1;
done
NOTE: You may need sudo before the dd command, depending on your permissions.
Here are my results for an SSD:
real 0m1.375s user 0m0.285s sys 0m0.944s
And a HDD:
real 0m14.249s user 0m0.752s sys 0m6.284s
As you can see, the HDD takes about 10x the duration. This may not be reliable for some very fast HDD’s, but in general, it will give you a good idea.
Method 5
The other answers already tell you how to get this information in a number of ways , including /proc. But you must expect all these mechanisms to lie if there’s any virtualisation in the way, such as a hybrid SAN array with multiple tiers, or if the Linux machine is a virtual machine (where Linux will probably report the disk as a basic SCSI rotating disk, regardless of what the hardware really is)
Method 6
check cat /proc/scsi/scsi. there you should see the exact model of your disk. then you just google the model to find info about it.
Method 7
This is an old post but I wanted to share another way to do this which I found out by accident:
sg_vpd --page=bdc /dev/sda
This commands fetches the Vital Product Data for the block device characteristics. For a rotating head disk, the output will include:
Nominal rotation rate: 7200 rpm
For an SSD, it will include:
Non-rotating medium (e.g. solid state)
Method 8
Type this in your Linux terminal:
cat /proc/scsi/scsi
Like mine:
$ cat /proc/scsi/scsi Attached devices: Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00 Vendor: ATA Model: ST1000LM024 HN-M Rev: 0004 Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05 Host: scsi1 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00 Vendor: ATA Model: SAMSUNG SSD PM83 Rev: 3D1Q Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05 Host: scsi2 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00 Vendor: HL-DT-ST Model: DVD+-RW GT80N Rev: A103 Type: CD-ROM ANSI SCSI revision: 05
You can see the model of your hard drive if it is SSD or HHD.
Method 9
find /sys/block/* -maxdepth 1 -exec echo {} ; -exec grep '0' {}/queue/rotational ; | grep -B1 '^0' | grep '^/' | sed 's/^.*///g'
This searches all block devices and check to see if it is rotary (1); if not (0) it is ssd.
This only displays discs marked as ssd.
Method 10
If you want to be lazy and realy want to read something like ssd or hdd
give
sudo lshw -short -C disk
a try.
My Output shows both:
H/W path Device Class Description ======================================================= /0/100/17/0 /dev/sda disk 1TB TOSHIBA MQ01ABD1 /0/100/17/1 /dev/sdb disk 128GB SSD PHISON 128GB /0/100/17/0.0.0 /dev/sr0 disk DVDRAM GUD0N
All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0