If you have recently bought a laptop or a pre-built desktop computer and are not sure if your system has an SSD in it, you can use built-in Windows tools to verify that. You don’t have to physically open the system. Here are a few different ways to find out if your system has an SSD, HDD or both in Windows 10.
1. Use Defragment and Optimize Drive Tool
The Defragmentation tool in Windows 10 is generally used to defragment fragmented drives. As part of that, the Defragment tool gives quite a bit of information about all the physical disks on your system. We can use that information to find out if you have an SDD or not.
- First, search for “Defragment and Optimize Drive” in the Start menu and open it.
- As soon as the defragment tool has been opened, you will see all your partitions on the main screen. If you look at the “Media Type” section, you can see what type of hard drive you have. If you have an SSD, the tool will list it as “Solid state drive.” If you have a regular mechanical hard drive, it will list it as “Hard disk drive.”
In my case, since I have two disks, SSD for Windows installation and HDD for regular storage, the Defragment tool is showing both drives. Once you’ve found out if you have an SSD or not, simply close the window. Don’t worry about fragmentation. Windows will automatically defragment your drives either weekly or monthly.
2. Use PowerShell
If you don’t mind the command-line user interface, you can do pretty much anything on Windows using PowerShell. In fact, all it takes is one command to find out if you have an SSD, HDD, or both.
- To get the hard disk details, you need to open the PowerShell as an administrator. To do that, search for “PowerShell” in the Start menu, right-click on the result and select the “Run as Administrator” option.
- In the PowerShell window type Get-PhysicalDisk and press Enter to execute the command. This command will scan and list all the hard drives on your system with a variety of useful information like serial number, health status, size, etc., regarding each physical drive.
- Just like with the Defragment tool, if you look under the “Media Type” section, you can see your hard disk type. If you have an SSD, the media type will list it as an SSD.
3. Use Speccy (third-party software)
Speccy is a simple, free third-party tool that shows a mountain of information regarding all your system hardware like CPU, hard disks, motherboard, peripherals, network cards, etc.
- Go ahead and download Speccy from its official website. Once downloaded, install and open Speccy using the desktop keyboard shortcut or the start menu entry.
- After opening Speccy, select “Storage” on the left panel. On the right panel Speccy will list all your hard drives. If there is an SSD in your system, Speccy will add an “(SSD)” tag next to the hard drive name. As you can see from the below image, my SSD has the SSD tag and HDD has no tag.
Comment below sharing your thoughts and experiences regarding using the above methods to find out if the included drive(s) is an SSD or HDD.