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I am not that experienced with Windows, but I need to use a Windows server for my FileMaker server, so now have an instance of Windows Server 2008 R2 at a hosting site.

It's supposed to come with 120 GB of SSD storage, and I want to confirm that the drive is really SSD. I've searched around trying to find an answer, but haven't found one yet. There seems to be checks for this for Windows 10, but they don't apply to Windows Server 2008 R2.

In the Server Manager, Drive C: is just listed as Simple, Basic, NTFS, Healthy.

In the Device Manager the drive appears as VMWare Virtual Disk SCSI disk device. That is what first got me to thinking because I haven't used SCSI connectors for years.

If I control-click on the drive and check the properties, there are various tabs (General, Tools, Harware, etc.) but none of them give a drive type or model number or anything like that.

Under the Tools tab I see options for Error Checking, Defragmentation and Backup. I understand for Windows 10 there would also be an Optimize option here which would show the drive type, but that doesn't appear on this server.

Windows PowerShell is also installed, and if there is some command line query I can use for this it would be nice to know.

Everything is working, I would just like to know about the drive type, which is supposed to be enterprise grade SSD.

Thanks.

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  • superuser.com/questions/840425/…
    – Thomas
    Dec 30, 2017 at 14:05
  • As mentioned in my post, the Optimize option described there doesn't appear in Windows Server 2008 R2. That was actually one of the pages I tried before my post.
    – Doug Lerner
    Dec 30, 2017 at 14:16
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    You usually can't see from inside the guest what type of drives are used by the host; you will need access to the host and VM management tools to find out.
    – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
    Dec 30, 2017 at 14:18
  • I'm not sure what you mean by guest vs host here (I'm inexperienced with Windows), but I believe I do have complete access to all the settings via Remote Desktop, can add software, run scripts, etc. Are you saying that information is just blocked via the virtual OS manager?
    – Doug Lerner
    Dec 30, 2017 at 14:21

1 Answer 1

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You may not be able to determine the physical drive type that the host is presenting to the guest, but you can run a disk performance test.

If it is really slow, probably not an SSD. If it is faster than a traditional disk with a spindle, it probably is an SSD.

https://sqlperformance.com/2015/08/io-subsystem/diskspd-test-storage
https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/DiskSpd-a-robust-storage-6cd2f223

You need to specify a test file size that is at least as large is the storage subsystem cache, so I would use a file size of at least 20 GB.

If DiskSpd doesn't work on 2008 R2, you can use SQLIO:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=20163

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  • Thanks. I've downloaded it from your 2nd link. As I mentioned, I'm not experienced in Windows so I have to figure out how to actually install it and then run the commands shown under PowerShell. It's past midnight here, so I will give it a go in the morning!
    – Doug Lerner
    Dec 30, 2017 at 15:21
  • It seems like I can enter the C: partition itself as a target. I ran .\diskspd -d15 -F1 -w0 -r -b4k -o10 c: and got a lot of results, but I don't really know how to interpret them - whether it's fast or slow.
    – Doug Lerner
    Dec 31, 2017 at 9:48

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