Linux get info about hdd

7 easy methods to check disk type (HDD or SSD) in Linux

Table of Contents

In this article I will share different commands which can be used to check the hard drive (disk) type in your Linux environment. I have verified these commands on RHEL/CentOS Linux so if you are using a different distribution such as Ubuntu, Debian, etc then some of the commands may now work.

Check disk type (HDD or SSD)

There are different types of disk available out of which the most used are Hard Drive (HDD) and Solid State Drive (SSD). You can use the following methods to identify your disk type whether it is HDD or SSD

Method 1: Check if the disk is rotational

You should check the value of /sys/block/sdX/queue/rotational , where sdX is the drive name. If the value is 0, you’re dealing with an SSD, and 1 means plain old HDD.

These are the available disks on my Linux server:

Now we can check the rotational value of these individual disks:

As the value for both the disks are 1, it means my both the disks are HDD.

Method 2: Using lsblk

Here also we will use the concept of identifying the disks with rotational feature to check the disk type. Although here we are using lsblk to list all the available connected disk types and their respective rotational values:

So all the identified disks have rotational value as 1 so this means they all are part of HDD.

Here I have another setup with SSD disks:

Method 3: Using disk model number

We can get the model number of the disk using lsblk command:

If you are using any kind of RAID such as hardware or software raid then it is possible you won’t get the model number with above command. In such case we have to rely on some third party tools. For example on my HPE Proliant Blades we are using hardware and software raid so on those servers I get following output:

As you see instead of Model Number, I get » LOGICAL VOLUME » so here I rely on HPE third party software such as ssacli and HPE Array Configuration Utility (acu cli) to get the model number. First we need the physical drive location, which can be collected using:

Now that we have the Physical Drive location i.e. 1I:1:1, we can query the details for this PD:

As you see it gives us a bunch of information about the drive we are using along with the model number.

Now that we have the model number of both our disk, we can search for the specification guide of these disks. For example the above model number is for Smasung disk which as per their online specification guide is SSD

You can also use different commands to get the model number of the disks, such as

This can give you a long list of output but you can filter the model number from the output, sample below from my server:

Check disk interface types

Now that you are familiar with the type of disk you are using, you should know the type of disk interface you are using in your environment. The different types of available disk interface types are

• Advanced technology attachment (ATA)
• Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE)
• Serial ATA (SATA)
• Small Computer system interface (SCSI)
• Serial attached SCSI (SAS)
• Fibre Channel

Method 1: Using lspci

lspci is a utility for displaying information about PCI buses in the system and devices connected to them. We can grep for the specific interface type from the output of lspci

Method 2: Using lshw

lshw is a small tool to extract detailed information on the hardware configuration of the machine. It can report exact memory configuration, firmware version, mainboard configuration, CPU version and speed, cache configuration, bus speed, etc. on DMI-capable x86 or IA-64 systems and on some PowerPC machines. It currently supports DMI (x86 and IA-64 only), OpenFirmware device tree (PowerPC only), PCI/AGP, CPUID (x86), IDE/ATA/ATAPI, PCMCIA (only tested on x86), SCSI and USB

Here is a sample output with SCSI disk interface

Here is a sample output with SATA interface

Here is a sample output from NVME disks

Here is a sample output with ATA disk interface

Why the bus info is SCSI when the disk interface type is ATA Disk?

If you observe the above output, we have ATA as the disk interface while the bus info is SCSI. The bud info is SCSI because that is the subsystem that provides IO for these disks.
It basically means that even though the disk interface is ATA, the drivers interact to the next kernel layer (the generic disk driver) using SCSI. This isn’t actually true of all SATA drivers on all kernel versions with all kernel compile-time configurations, but it’s common. Even PATA devices can appear as SCSI at that level (again, that depends on the kernel version and kernel compile-time configuration, as well as whether the ide-scsi module is used).

Method 3: Using hdparm

hdparm provides a command line interface to various kernel interfaces supported by the Linux SATA/PATA/SAS «libata» subsystem and the older IDE driver sub-system. Many newer (2008 and later) USB drive enclosures now also support «SAT» (SCSI-ATA Command Translation) and therefore may also work with hdparm.

We can use -I with hdparm which will request identification info directly from the drive, which is displayed in a new expanded format. Here are some example outputs:

But hdparm works exclusively with devices which speak the ATA protocol, for disks with other protocols, you may get the following error:

Method 4: Using lsblk

This can be one of the most reliable method to get the disk interface type. lsblk lists information about all available or the specified block devices. Using -o with lsblk we can print additional columns. To get the disk interface type we can use «TRAN» which will print the device transport type.

For example on a server using Fibre Channel:

On a server using HDD, here both the disks are using SAS protocol.

On Virtual Box environment, the virtual disks are using SATA while the DVD is using ATA protocol:

Conclusion

In this tutorial we explored different commands and methods which can be used to check the disk type and the disk interface type used to detect the disks in the server. But before you use these commands, you should be familiar with all the different disk and interfaces available.

Related Posts: how to check my hard disk is ssd or hdd. how to check if you have a solid state drive. what kind of hard drive do I have. how to check ssd. how to check disk type hdd or ssd. how to check disk interface type in Linux.

Related Posts

Didn’t find what you were looking for? Perform a quick search across GoLinuxCloud

If my articles on GoLinuxCloud has helped you, kindly consider buying me a coffee as a token of appreciation.

For any other feedbacks or questions you can either use the comments section or contact me form.

Thank You for your support!!

Источник

How To Find Out Hard Disk Specs / Details on Linux

Using lsblk command to find out hard disk information

Run the lsblk command as follows to lists information about all available or the specified block devices:
# lsblk
# lsblk /dev/DISK
# lsblk /dev/sda
So I have two NVMe SSD in RAID-1 mode with encrypted partitions:

Another option is to run the following command to list all disks and their names:
# ls -lF /dev/disk/by-id/

Linux show block device such as hard disk drive attributes

Open the terminal app and then type the blkid command:
# blkid

hdparm Command

Open the terminal and type the following command to find information about /dev/sda:
# hdparm -I /dev/sda
OR
$ sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda
Sample outputs:

lshw Command

You need to install lshw command using apt-get or yum command. To display all disks and storage controllers in the system, enter:
# lshw -class disk -class storage
Sample outputs:

Finding Out Linux Disks Names Only

The following lshw command will quickly list installed disks including CD/DVD/BD drivers:
# lshw -short -C disk
Sample outputs:

Another option so to run the fdisk command as follows:
# fdisk -l
Use the grep command/egrep command to filter out loopback and other unwanted devices:
# fdisk -l | grep ‘^Disk /dev/’
# fdisk -l | grep ‘^Disk /dev/’ | egrep -v ‘/dev/(loop|mapper|md)’

Linux GUI Disk Utility

Gnome users can use the gnome-disk-utility/gnome-disks for the following purposes:

• Get information about installed disks and its current health.
• Manage and configure disk drives.
• Configure media.
• Set up software RAID devices and more.

Type the following command or start Disk utility by visiting Applications > System Tools > Disk Utility :
$ palimpsest
OR
$ gnome-disks
Sample outputs:

Fig.01: Linux List Hard Drives GUI Tool & Command — Click to enlarge

Fig.02: Samrtdata about hard disk

The smartctl command

The smartctl command act as a control and monitor Utility for SMART disks under Linux and Unix like operating systems. Type the following command to get information about /dev/sda (SATA disk):
# smartctl -d ata -a -i /dev/sda
Sample outputs:

A Note About RAID and SCSI Disks

Try the following commands for SCSI and hardware RAID based devices:

• No ads and tracking
• In-depth guides for developers and sysadmins at Opensourceflare✨
• Join my Patreon to support independent content creators and start reading latest guides:
  • How to set up Redis sentinel cluster on Ubuntu or Debian Linux
  • How To Set Up SSH Keys With YubiKey as two-factor authentication (U2F/FIDO2)
  • How to set up Mariadb Galera cluster on Ubuntu or Debian Linux
  • A podman tutorial for beginners – part I (run Linux containers without Docker and in daemonless mode)
  • How to protect Linux against rogue USB devices using USBGuard

Join Patreon ➔

1. sdparm Command – fetch SCSI / SATA device information.
2. scsi_id Command – queries a SCSI device via the SCSI INQUIRY vital product data (VPD).
3. Use smartctl To Check Disk Behind Adaptec RAID Controllers
4. Use smartctl Check Hard Disk Behind 3Ware RAID Card

Conclusion

You learned about finding hard disk drive infromation on Linux. To get more information about your hard disk, refer to our other articles and tutorials:

🐧 Get the latest tutorials on Linux, Open Source & DevOps via

Источник

10 Commands to Check Disk Partitions and Disk Space on Linux

In this post we are taking a look at some commands that can be used to check up the partitions on your system.

The commands would check what partitions there are on each disk and other details like the total size, used up space and file system etc.

Commands like fdisk, sfdisk and cfdisk are general partitioning tools that can not only display the partition information, but also modify them.

1. fdisk

Fdisk is the most commonly used command to check the partitions on a disk. The fdisk command can display the partitions and details like file system type. However it does not report the size of each partitions.

Each device is reported separately with details about size, seconds, id and individual partitions.

2. sfdisk

Sfdisk is another utility with a purpose similar to fdisk, but with more features. It can display the size of each partition in MB.

3. cfdisk

Cfdisk is a linux partition editor with an interactive user interface based on ncurses. It can be used to list out the existing partitions as well as create or modify them.

Here is an example of how to use cfdisk to list the partitions.

Cfdisk works with one partition at a time. So if you need to see the details of a particular disk, then pass the device name to cfdisk.

4. parted

Parted is yet another command line utility to list out partitions and modify them if needed.
Here is an example that lists out the partition details.

Df is not a partitioning utility, but prints out details about only mounted file systems. The list generated by df even includes file systems that are not real disk partitions.

Here is a simple example

Only the file systems that start with a /dev are actual devices or partitions.
Use grep to filter out real hard disk partitions/file systems.

To display only real disk partitions along with partition type, use df like this

Note that df shows only the mounted file systems or partitions and not all.

6. pydf

Improved version of df, written in python. Prints out all the hard disk partitions in a easy to read manner.

Again, pydf is limited to showing only the mounted file systems.

7. lsblk

Lists out all the storage blocks, which includes disk partitions and optical drives. Details include the total size of the partition/block and the mount point if any.
Does not report the used/free disk space on the partitions.

If there is no MOUNTPOINT, then it means that the file system is not yet mounted. For cd/dvd this means that there is no disk.

Lsblk is capbale of displaying more information about each device like the label and model. Check out the man page for more information

Display UUID and Model of device

The «-o» option can be used to specify the columns to display. The following example shows the UUID and model name column along with other columns.

The above output has all the necessary information about all the storage devices present on the system or connected via usb. You can see the device name, size, mount point, uuid, model name etc.

This is the best command to see all information about storage devices together in one place.

8. blkid

Prints the block device (partitions and storage media) attributes like uuid and file system type. Does not report the space on the partitions.

9. hwinfo

The hwinfo is a general purpose hardware information tool and can be used to print out the disk and partition list.

The output however does not print details about each partition like the above commands.

To learn more about the Hwinfo command check this post:
Check hardware information on Linux with hwinfo command

10. Inxi

Inxi is a very useful command line program that can display information about various hardware components present on the system. To display information about the disk drives and storage devices use the «-D» option with inxi.

The «-x» option prints extra available information.
The output from inxi does not contains details like UUID and mount directory.

To learn more about the inxi command check out this post:
Inxi is an amazing tool to check hardware information on Linux

Summary

The output of parted is concise and complete to get an overview of different partitions, file system on them and the total space. Pydf and df are limited to showing only mounted file systems and the same on them.

Fdisk and Sfdisk show a whole lot of information that can take sometime to interpret whereas, Cfdisk is an interactive partitioning tool that display a single device at a time.

So try them out, and do not forget to comment below.

A Tech Enthusiast, Blogger, Linux Fan and a Software Developer. Writes about Computer hardware, Linux and Open Source software and coding in Python, Php and Javascript. He can be reached at [email protected] .

47 thoughts on “ 10 Commands to Check Disk Partitions and Disk Space on Linux ”

Thank you for this great summary of relevant commands and also showing whether SU privileges are needed or not.

Good article. Thanks for writing this .
I’d also suggest including “ncdu” (stands for ncurses du) – https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu – in this as it’s quite useful in knowing the disk usage on the terminal in a graphical way

pydf hands down the best alternative if you want a quick glance at disk usage!

Very useful, thank you!

very useful,
How about GUI tools?

Hardinfo is a GUI tool that shows hardware information including disk drives and partitions..
On ubuntu it can be installed with the following command

sudo apt-get install hardinfo

Another tool is gparted.
It is a partition management tool, but can also be used to list the disk drives and partitions

Well done — I learned something!

glad to know that.
thanks for the comment.

Very useful. Thank you for your effort.

Detailed and to the point post. Thanks A Ton!

Источник