How to see hard disk specifications and details
Under normal conditions, you may not need to know much about the hard disk(s) itself. But when you do, it is nice to know what tools are available to query the right piece of information. Information like vendor, disk type, speed, and size.
Show available hard disk devices
If we want to know what hard disks are available, have a look at how to see the available hard disks.
Basic information about hard disks (using lshw)
Basic information about a hard disk can be displayed using lshw. It shows the device name, size, sector sizes, and some capabilities of the hard disk. It’s a great start, and sometimes enough to get the information you wanted.
# lshw -class disk
*-cdrom
description: DVD reader
product: QEMU DVD-ROM
vendor: QEMU
physical id: 0.0.0
bus info: scsi@1:0.0.0
logical name: /dev/cdrom
logical name: /dev/sr0
version: 2.5+
capabilities: removable audio dvd
configuration: ansiversion=5 status=nodisc
*-disk
description: SCSI Disk
product: QEMU HARDDISK
vendor: QEMU
physical id: 0.0.0
bus info: scsi@2:0.0.0
logical name: /dev/sda
version: 2.5+
size: 16GiB (17GB)
capabilities: 5400rpm gpt-1.00 partitioned partitioned:gpt
configuration: ansiversion=5 guid=59907fc9-3694-4808-8f5b-9032ae1b279d logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512
Show specifics about SATA hard disks (using hdparm)
The next tool is hdparm and like previous tool often available on Linux systems. To query identification information from the drive itself, we can use the -I option.
# hdparm -I /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
ATA device, with non-removable media
Standards:
Likely used: 1
Configuration:
Logical max current
cylinders 0 0
heads 0 0
sectors/track 0 0
--
Logical/Physical Sector size: 512 bytes
device size with M = 1024*1024: 0 MBytes
device size with M = 1000*1000: 0 MBytes
cache/buffer size = unknown
Capabilities:
IORDY not likely
Cannot perform double-word IO
R/W multiple sector transfer: not supported
DMA: not supported
PIO: pio0
Information about NVMe devices (using nvme)
The hdparm will most likely not able to show information about newer disk types. For NVMe disks, we can use the nvme tool.
# nvme list /dev/nvme0
Node SN Model Namespace Usage Format FW Rev
--------------------- -------------------- ---------------------------------------- --------- -------------------------- ---------------- --------
/dev/nvme0n1 SSSSSSSSSSSSSSS Samsung SSD 960 PRO 1TB 1 89,74 GB / 1,00 TB 512 B + 0 B 12345678
/dev/nvme1n1 STTTTTTTTTTTTTT Samsung SSD 960 PRO 1TB 1 53,20 GB / 1,00 TB 512 B + 0 B 12345678
Important: without root permissions, no details will be shown
The nvme tool is most likely part of the nvme-cli package and might to be installed first.