Determine the Manufacturer of Your Macs SSD (Hard Drive)

Jun 21, 2012 - 6 Comments

Check the Manufacturer of an SSD Drive in Mac OS X

If you’re wondering who made the SSD (flash storage) drive on a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro it’s fairly easy to determine:

  1. Pull down the  Apple menu and choose “About This Mac”, then click on “More Info”
  2. Click “System Report”
  3. Look under “Hardware” for the “Serial-ATA” entry and select it
  4. Expand the chipset and look for “APPLE SSD SM128” or similar, the final block of characters show the manufacturer, model, and size. With an SSD on MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, they are as follows:
    • TS = Toshiba
    • SM = Samsung
    • Other = likely 3rd party upgrade

If you guessed the 128, 256, 512, etc on the end was the storage capacity of the flash drive, you were right.

Apple uses multiple hardware manufacturers to be able to meet demand. There is some evidence to suggest the drives manufactured by Samsung are faster than the Toshiba drives, but due to the ultrafast nature of all SSD storage the difference is practically irrelevant. This is especially true with the 2012 model year MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models, whose SSD benchmarks show incredibly impressive results regardless of who created the drive.

A more complex method using the command line can be used to determine the manufacturer of the Macs LCD display panel.

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Related articles:

Posted by: Paul Horowitz in Mac, Mac OS, Tips & Tricks

6 Comments

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  1. Paperoni says:

    omfg…

    It’s like opening a pack of Pokemon cards,

    but I’m not complaining because I JUST COLLECTED A HITACHI!!!

    *squeals like a little girl*

  2. Ali Akmaz says:

    Apple SSD SD256A for me. this is SANDISK?

  3. Jaleo says:

    i got ST (Seagate) on my Macbook Pro 13′

  4. Tamas says:

    I have an Hitachi HDD in my MacMini.

  5. Kyle Winters says:

    I got a Toshiba

  6. doug says:

    Samsung for me. Excellent.

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