[Explained]: Is C Drive SSD?

Is my C drive SSD?

Users often ask “is SSD same as C drive?”, and “does the C Drive=SSD?”. They must have confused the concept between C drive and SSD, C drive is not equal to SSD. In fact, most of the time, the C drive is used as the system partition of the computer to store the operating system and related data. An SSD is a solid-state drive, and an SSD can be divided into many partitions.

When users have both a mechanical hard disk (HDD) and a solid-state drive (SSD) installed on a PC, they may be wondering how to determine whether the C drive is on an SSD or an HDD. This post aims to show you the easiest way to find is C drive SSD in Windows 10 and 11.

Step 1. Press “Windows + R”, type in “dfrgui” and hit Enter.

Step 2. In this window, you can see the disk type of the C drive and the other drives on the PC.

What is the difference between SSD and HDD?

After understanding how to check is C drive SSD or HDD, we need to figure out what is the difference between SSD and HDD, because this is the reason why users want to know is C drive SSD.

Both hard disk drives (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSD) are data storage devices, but there are differences between the two. HDD is a traditional technology. It consists of multiple platters and has a large storage capacity but slow read and write speeds.

An SSD, on the other hand, consists of an array of solid-state electronic memory chips. It's smaller and runs faster, but costs more than HDD. Common SSD brands include Samsung, Kingston, Seagate, WD, Intel, SanDisk, etc.

Due to the excellent performance of SSD, more and more users want their C drive to be located in SSD, because it can improve the running speed of PC.

What to do if the C drive is on HDD?

Now you should know how to check is C drive SSD and the difference between HDD and SSD. What would you do if you found out that the C drive was on the HDD instead of the SSD? Many people may choose to reinstall Windows, but that will lose data!

There is an easier way, you can transfer the C drive to SSD with AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. This is a powerful and safe third-party partition management software that allows users to migrate OS from HDD to SSD without losing data. Here are the detailed steps:

Tips:
◥ You can download the demo version to have a free trial.
◥ Make sure the SSD is recognized by the PC.
◥ If the HDD is MBR and the SSD is GPT, you need to change the boot mode from Legacy to UEFI to boot successfully. If you don’t want to switch, you can convert the SSD to MBR to make it the same as the source disk.

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Click on "Clone" > “Migrate OS”.

Step 2. Choose the partition on the SSD and click on “Next”.

Step 3. Now, you can resize the new C drive on the SSD as you need or prefer.

Step 4. Click on “Apply” to commit the pending operation. Once done, the C drive has been moved to the SSD. To boot from it, you need to restart the computer, go into the BIOS setup, change the boot order, set the SSD as the first boot device, and reboot.

What to do if the C drive is slow on the SSD?

What should you do if the C drive is on an SSD, but it still doesn't run as fast as you want?

It's most likely that the partitions on the SSD are not 4K aligned. SSD uses the smallest 4K sector in the file system to hold data. If the smallest 4K allocation unit is not always aligned with the 4K pages in the SSD, the performance of the SSD will suffer.

Fortunately, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional can also help you align your partitions.

Step 1. Install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant. Right-click the partition you want to align and select Advanced > Partition Alignment.

Step 2. In the pop-up window, select 4096 sectors from the given list and click OK.

Step 3. Click Apply > Proceed to execute the operation.

Waning: If 4K alignment is performed on the system partition, a reboot is required.

Wrap thing up

After reading this tutorial, I believe you already know how to check is C drive SSD. In addition, this article also gives corresponding solutions for two other situations. If you want to migrate system partition and 4K alignment in Windows Server, please change to AOMEI Partition Assistant Server.