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Hardware Guide - Identifying your HDD
Contributors: Yamadron, Felix

How To Identify Your Hard Disk Drive

There are two primary technologies available at present relating to your computer's mass storage. The first is Hard Disk Drives (HDD) and the second is Solid State Drives (SSD). HDD is an older technology which still uses mechanical moving parts. The SSD has no moving parts and can perform read actions far faster than HDD. However, the HDD can still outperform the SSD in other areas, which we will not go in to here.

To help us here we will need to run the free and simple to use PC Wizard program. This is the same program used to identify your Audio details here. If you don't have PC Wizard installed yet then grab the tiny file from our Tools page.

Ok let’s run the PC Wizard .exe file and take a look at our Hard Disk Drive (HDD)

Below we have included an image that points towards the HDD icon.
Click on the image below to zoom in.

how to identify your Hard Disk Drive image 1

This will display all the logical drives, hard disk drives and optical disk drives. The image below shows an example of this.
Click on the image below to zoom in

how to identify your Hard Disk Drive image 2

Double click on “Number of Hard Disk” (or “Number of Solid State Disk” if you have one) will display the specification of your HDD/SSD.
Click on the image below to zoom in

how to identify your Hard Disk Drive image 3

This displays your Hard Disk Cache Size and your HDD RPM.
Note: SSDs have no RPM. They contain no moveable parts at all. They are like flash drives.


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