If you want to know how to find out what hard drive you have installed in your computer system, we’ll show you how you can find out, assuming your running a Windows operating system. You might assume if you bought a DELL computer it is all DELL parts; same whether it’s HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Toshiba, or any other brand. You maybe surprised to find different brand name parts inside the actual casing of the laptop or computer tower.
Open the device manager. You can do this easily in Windows Vista and Windows 7 by right clicking on “Computer” and selecting “Manage”. Then click on “Device Manager” on the left side of your screen.
If you are running Windows 8, you can right click down in the bottom left corner of your screen and a popup menu should appear and you can select “Device Manager”.
When in the device manager, expand the “Disk Drives” section on the right side of that window. Looking at the code, in this example it starts ST9500, you can tell what type of hard drive you have. There are a couple ways to find out what drives you have.
You can type that name into Google and see what drive make it says your drive is. But you have to rely on the source you are getting this information from. Another way is pretty simple. Here’s a short list:
If the drive starts with ST… it is a Seagate
If the drive starts with WD… it is a Western Digital.
HN…, HM…, SD… is Samsung
If the drives starts with anything else, you might need to search as I mentioned above. Either way, if you’re trying to find out for the purpose of what diagnostic tool to download, you can safely assume Seagate Seatools.