Practical Lab: Storage Inspection

Objective

Find out what kind of drive (or drives) your PC has, how it is connected, how healthy it is, and whether Windows is looking after it the right way (TRIM for an SSD, defragmenting for an HDD). You only look. Nothing in this lab changes any setting or deletes any data.

Time: 25-30 minutes
You need: A Windows PC. No extra software is needed. (One free optional tool is named in Part 6.)

What to Open

Part 1: What Does Task Manager Say?

Open Task Manager and click the Performance tab. On the left, click each Disk entry (Disk 0, Disk 1, and so on).

1. Disk number and name: ________________
2. Type (shown near the top right of the graph; newer Windows versions say HDD, SSD or NVMe): ________________
3. Capacity and Formatted size: ________________
4. Active time right now: ________________
5. Average response time (in ms): ________________

Look at the average response time. An HDD often shows several milliseconds to tens of milliseconds when busy. An SSD usually shows well under 1 ms. That is Section 1.5 in real life.

(On older Windows versions the type line is missing. Parts 2 and 3 give the same answer.)

Part 2: Ask PowerShell About Your Physical Drives

Type each line and press Enter:

Get-PhysicalDisk | Select-Object FriendlyName, MediaType, BusType, HealthStatus, Size
Get-Disk | Select-Object Number, FriendlyName, PartitionStyle, Size
Get-Volume | Select-Object DriveLetter, FileSystemLabel, FileSystem, Size, SizeRemaining

Fill in for your main drive:

6. MediaType (HDD, SSD, or Unspecified): ________________
7. BusType (SATA, NVMe, USB, RAID...): ________________
8. HealthStatus (should say Healthy): ________________
9. Size (in bytes. Divide by 1,000,000,000 for GB): ________________
10. PartitionStyle (GPT or MBR): ________________
11. Percent free on C: (SizeRemaining ÷ Size × 100): ________________

Reading the answer: If the BusType is NVMe, your drive uses the NVMe protocol over PCIe (Section 4). If it is SATA and the MediaType is SSD, it is a SATA SSD (limited to about 550 MB/s). If MediaType is HDD, it spins. Some drives (or USB-attached ones) report Unspecified. That is normal, not an error.

(Do not use the old wmic diskdrive command. It is deprecated, which means Microsoft is phasing it out. The PowerShell commands above are the modern way.)

Part 3: Health Counters (If Your Drive Reports Them)

Get-PhysicalDisk | Get-StorageReliabilityCounter | Select-Object DeviceId, Temperature, Wear, PowerOnHours, ReadErrorsTotal, WriteErrorsTotal

12. Temperature: ________________ (a drive is usually fine up to about 60-70 degrees Celsius; check the maker's limit)
13. Wear (SSD: the percentage of rated life used; blank on many HDDs): ________________
14. PowerOnHours: ________________
15. Read and write errors total: ________________

If fields are blank or the command shows an error: That means your drive or driver does not report those counters, or the command needs administrator rights. It does not mean the drive is broken. (This is the same "SMART" information from Section 3.5, just shown by Windows.)

Part 4: Is TRIM Switched On?

In PowerShell or Command Prompt type:

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

16. Result: ________________

DisableDeleteNotify = 0 means TRIM is enabled (good for an SSD). On some Windows versions the command prints a line for NTFS and one for ReFS; the NTFS line is the one that matters here. If the result is 1, TRIM is off. Do not change it just because of this lab; find out why first.

Part 5: Optimize Drives (HDD versus SSD)

Open Defragment and Optimize Drives. Do not press Optimize in this lab. Just read the window.

17. Media type column for each drive (Solid state drive / Hard disk drive): ________________
18. Last run / Current status: ________________
19. Is Scheduled optimization on? (Click Change settings to read, then Cancel.) ________________

What the tool does: On a hard disk drive it defragments (joins scattered pieces of files together to cut seek time, Section 1.5). On a solid state drive it retrims instead, sending TRIM for free space (Section 3.2). Windows picks the right action by itself. You can also see the retrim in Command Prompt as defrag C: /L (run only if you know you want it; it is not needed for this lab).

Do not defragment an SSD in the old sense. Windows does not do it, and neither should you.

Part 6: Look at the Same Drives Another Way

6A. Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc): The bottom half shows each physical disk (Disk 0, Disk 1) as a bar, divided into partitions.

20. How many partitions does Disk 0 have? ________________
21. Which are shown as "EFI System Partition" or "Recovery Partition"? ________________

6B. Device Manager: Open Disk drives. Then open Storage controllers.

22. Name of your disk in "Disk drives": ________________
23. Do you see "NVM Express Controller" or "Standard SATA AHCI Controller"? ________________

That tells you the protocol you learned in Section 4: NVM Express means NVMe; AHCI means SATA.

6C. System Information (msinfo32): In the left tree open Components, then Storage, then Disks.

24. Model, Size and Partitions: ________________

6D. (Optional) A free third-party tool: A disk-health program such as CrystalDiskInfo shows the full SMART table (power-on count, host writes, wear, reallocated sectors) and gives a Good/Caution/Bad rating. It is not part of Windows. Download it only from the maker's official website. It is not needed for this lab.

What Should Happen

• Parts 1-3 all agree on what your drive is (HDD, SATA SSD or NVMe) and that it is Healthy.
• Part 4 shows TRIM on (0) if you use an SSD.
• Part 5 lists SSDs as "Solid state drive" and HDDs as "Hard disk drive".
• Part 6 shows the same drive from the Windows disk, device and system viewpoints.

Interpretation Guide

Follow-Up Questions

1. Your PC has an HDD and an SSD. Which drive would you put Windows and your programs on, and why?
2. Task Manager shows 100% active time on an HDD but only 2 MB/s of transfer. What is the likely cause, and what does it tell you about HDDs?
3. Why does Windows retrim an SSD instead of defragmenting it?
4. A friend says "my SATA SSD only gives 550 MB/s, so it must be faulty". What do you tell them?
5. Name three facts from this lab that you could not have learned by looking at the outside of your PC.