Solid State Drives are the best ways to boost your computer performance. Since Windows 10 has been treating SSD drives so well out of the box, SSD is recommended to run Windows 10 to give it full power. If you already have SSD inside your computer you may have already experienced how awesome it is. But how do we know that the hard drive inside your computer is actually an SSD that powers your Windows 10?
Here are 4 ways to find out.
PowerShell
The best and straightforward way is to use a PowerShell cmdlet called Get-PhysicalDisk that retrieves a list of all physical disk objects with a MediaType field that indicates whether the drive is an SSD or not.
Open a PowerShell window and simply run the command
Get-PhysicalDisk
Note that the cmdlet only works in Windows 8 and above so it won’t work on a Windows 7 computer.
Optimize Drives
Trim is natively supported in Windows 10 and it’s through Optimize Drives feature. Click Start menu, do a search for “Optimize Drives” and open one called “Defragment and Optimize Drives” from the list.
The Optimize Drives window opens up, from where you can tell which drive is Solid State Drive and which ones are not from the Media Type column.
Command Line
Well, if you are looking for a command line that can do the same you may be disappointed. At least, I wasn’t able to find a way to do this via a command line. However, alternatively, there is an open source called smartmontools that offers a command line that would tell whether a drive is an SSD or not.
Download the tool and install it on your computer. Once installed, do a Start menu search for smartctl and click smartctl (Admin CMD) from the list.
The elevated Command Prompt window opens up, and run the following command.
smartctl -a c:
Not only does it tells whether the drive is SSD but it also indicates if it’s still in good health.
3rd Party Tools
If you prefer using a GUI-based 3rd party tool, here are two portable tools for you.
CrystalDiskInfo is a portable disk utility that provides very detail information about your disks on your computer. It doesn’t tell you straight away but if you see a drive that has information such as NAND Writes or TRIM, you know it’s an SSD.
HWiNFO another portable free system utility tool with tons of features that generates an incredible amount of information about your computer. Expand Drives section and select the hard disk listed there, you will tell whether the highlighted drive is an SSD from the right panel.
That’s about all I discovered so far. Please share in the comments below if you know any other ways to find out if you have an SSD that powers up your Windows 10.