using c# how can I extract information about the hard drives present on the local machine

Question

I'm looking to get data such as Size/Capacity, Serial No, Model No, Heads Sectors, Manufacturer and possibly SMART data.

Answer 1

You can use WMI Calls to access info about the hard disks.

//Requires using System.Management; & System.Management.dll Reference

ManagementObject disk = new ManagementObject("win32_logicaldisk.deviceid=\"c:\""); 
disk.Get(); 
Console.WriteLine("Logical Disk Size = " + disk["Size"] + " bytes"); 
Console.WriteLine("Logical Disk FreeSpace = " + disk["FreeSpace"] + "bytes");

Answer 2

You should use the System.Management namespace:

System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher ms =
    new System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher("SELECT * FROM Win32_DiskDrive");
foreach (ManagementObject mo in ms.Get())
{
    System.Console.Write(mo["Model");
}

For details on the members of the Win32_DiskDrive class, check out:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394132(VS.85).aspx

Answer 3

The easiest way is to use WMI to get the required information. Take at look at the documentation for Win32___DiskDrive in MSDN, which contains a variety of standard drive properties. You can also try using the MSStorageDriver_ATAPISmartData WMI class, which I can't find any docs for at the moment, but should have all of the SMART data that you're looking for. Here's some basic sample code to enumerate all drives and get their properties:

ManagementClass driveClass = new ManagementClass("Win32_DiskDrive");
ManagementObjectCollection drives = driveClass.GetInstances();
foreach (ManagementObject drive in drives) 
{ 
    foreach (PropertyData property in drive.Properties)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Property: {0}, Value: {1}", property.Name, property.Value);        
    }
    Console.WriteLine();
}

Answer 4

You can use WMI to get most of the information you want, and there's an introduction to WMI here.