Is There a Way to See if a Hard Drive is Internal or External?

Question

I've got to check to see what are on some external hard drives. However, I'm doing this remote, with a tech onsite. We can't disconnect them to see which ones they are because they be very important database hard drives, and they may be nothing at all.

So, we have 4 hard drives in Disk Management. 2 are unallocated, and 2 are full of random stuff. I want to check if each one is external or internal.

Is there anyway to check that with a third party program, or within Server 2012 itself?

Solution

As IGRACH pointed out, You can use WMIC to find this data.

When the following command is run in cmd, it will give you a list of the connected drives, their type, the interface they are connected too and their index (which can be matched to the drives in Disk Management)

wmic diskdrive get Caption, MediaType, Index, InterfaceType

Caption                     Index  InterfaceType  MediaType
SanDisk SDSSDA240G          2      IDE            Fixed hard disk media
Corsair Force GT            1      IDE            Fixed hard disk media
Generic- SD/MMC USB Device  5      USB
KINGSTON SV300S37A120G      4      IDE            Fixed hard disk media
NORELSYS 106X USB Device    6      USB            External hard disk media
ST3000DM001-1CH166          3      IDE            Fixed hard disk media
Samsung SSD 850 PRO 256GB   0      IDE            Fixed hard disk media

You can also look in device manager, it will allow you to see what interface the drives are connected to. Right click the device, go to the properties. Open the details tab and select Device Instance Path.

For example, this drive is USB3:

This Drive is a SATA Drive:

Comments

[mt025]

This will only work for drives that have partitions, I believe.

[Chupo_cro]

My Seagate M3 Portable's Device instance path starts with SCSI\DISK&VEN and there is Seagate M3 Portable SCSI Disk Device at the top of the Details tab although the drive is connected to USB port. Furthermore the drive shows as internal and not among the devices with removable storage and there isn't Eject option on the right click menu when I click on the drive icon in This PC.