How to know if Drive is SSD or HDD through Terminal?

Question

I would like to know if there is a way through Terminal commands in Mac OS X to find out if an external drive is SSD or HDD.

klanomath · Answer 1 · 2014-12-03T21:07:04.007

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A very dirty solution ;-) : Enter system_profiler | grep "Media Type: SSD" in Terminal.app.

A more detailed approach is system_profiler SPSerialATADataType and you'll get all devices attached to your SATA interfaces with - beyond other informations - the Medium Type which may be Rotational or SSD.
By adding -xml > ~/Desktop/MyReport.spx you will get a XML-file on your desktop which can be opened by System Information.app.

edited Dec 03 '14 at 21:07

answered Dec 03 '14 at 20:49

klanomath

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For external drives..it dosent say much details...because all i got is Capacity,BSD Name,Content. any idea? – wam090 Dec 03 '14 at 21:13
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i'm looking into it...i fear it will be difficult – klanomath Dec 03 '14 at 21:24
@WM. if you're using an USB drive, you could try system_profiler SPUSBDataType – CodeBrauer May 17 '18 at 10:55

Allan · Answer 2 · 2018-01-02T13:18:04.523

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A super fast way to do this is to use diskutil to get this info:

diskutil info disk0 | grep "Solid State"

You will receive a "Yes/No" answer similar to the following:

Solid State:              Yes

Note: This does not work for all USB drives (the USB to SATA interface must support the extended AT command set).

edited Jan 02 '18 at 13:18

answered Nov 03 '16 at 12:42

Allan

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How to know if Drive is SSD or HDD through Terminal?

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