How to know which hard disk is the new one and which one is the old one

Question

I ordered 2 SSDs from my provider.

However, which drive is the main drive?

How do I know which drive is the new SSD drives?

Answer 1

You could check it by using the command

mount

It will give you all the mounted file systems. What you are interested is where the root file system is mounted (i presume thats what you mean by main drive).

This is my sample output of the mount command (just the line which contains the main disc)

/dev/sda1 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro)

What it says is that the partition sda1 (just sda represents the disn, sda1 represents the partition) is mounted as root. So now we know that the main disc is sda. Now we have to check what disc is actually sda.

Using lshw

Chech that with

sudo lshw -class disk

My output is

*-disk                  
   description: ATA Disk
   product: TOSHIBA
   vendor: ...
   physical id: ....
   bus info: ...
   logical name: /dev/sda
   version: ...
   serial: ...
   size: 465GiB (500GB)

From which we can see that sda is the 500GB Toshiba disc.

Using fdisk

sudo fdisk -l sda

Output:

Disk sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00024cba