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Is there a way to distinguish between the Internal Hard drives and External Hard drives.

Actually i need to see how many External hardrives do we have and to which server are they connected .

This is the Screenshot i took and by judging by its name SDE is external hard drive. But im not sure .

So help me out.

enter image description here

Further actions

Ok now i used lsusb and it said Western Digital Drive connected and its Drive No is SDE. But by using dmesg it said that sdb is also a removable disk. Any suggestions

'sd 0:0:1:0: Attached scsi removable disk sdb
  Vendor: WDC       Model: WD2500YD-01NVB1   Rev: 10.0
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 05
  Vendor: WDC       Model: WD2500YD-01NVB1   Rev: 10.0
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 05
  Vendor: WDC       Model: WD2500YD-01NVB1   Rev: 10.0
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 05
  Vendor: WDC       Model: WD2500YD-01NVB1   Rev: 10.0
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 05
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(offtopic) Please don't use screenshots if you don't have to. You could just copy/paste. – gertvdijk Dec 19 '12 at 11:41

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

@umair i am not sure why sdb is showing as removable , could you post the o/p of this script

for device in /sys/block/*
do
    if udevadm info --query=property --path=$device | grep -q ^ID_BUS=usb
    then
        echo $device
    fi
done
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Well the hard disk is already mounted and dmesg gives some 4 page output I didnt find this command helpful. – Umair Mustafa Dec 19 '12 at 10:50
@Umair lsusb this command will list all information about USB buses and devices that are attached to them, just see whether it helps – LINUX4U Dec 19 '12 at 10:55
Dear I used lsusb and added the detail in Question under Further actions. Kindly check it. – Umair Mustafa Dec 19 '12 at 11:07
sdb is marked as removable, probably because the controller supports SCSI/SATA hotplugging - also called "hot swap". – gertvdijk Dec 19 '12 at 11:40
up vote 1 down vote

I like to use this one-liner.

find /dev/disk/by-path -name "*-usb-*" -not -name "*-part*" -exec readlink -f {} \;

It will 1) list all devices with USB in its path somewhere, 2) filters for partitions and finally 3) reads the link it points to. Example output:

/dev/sdc

Important notes:

  • It will not work for external disks connected using another bus, e.g. eSATA, firewire, etc.
  • It's not able to distinguish USB flash drives and regular spinning hard drives.
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Means it will also list the devices like mouse, Keyboard??? – Umair Mustafa Dec 19 '12 at 13:09
@UmairMustafa No. See the find path: /dev/disk. – gertvdijk Dec 19 '12 at 13:18

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