How to detect storage devices in Linux

One of my clients wanted to find out how to detect storage devices in Linux for one of her servers in a remote location. After brewing a good cup of Catimor coffee variety at home I decided to take on this one. It took me a some time to find the Linux terminal commands for it. But, I got them and I’m sharing this simple commands. Check out below.

Look at vendor, product, logical name and etc

sudo lshw -class disk

This one gives you the most details about all your storage devices in Linux. The sample output is something like this:

*-cdrom                   
       description: DVD-RAM writer
       product: VMware SATA CD00
       vendor: NECVMWar
       physical id: 0.0.0
       bus info: scsi@3:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/cdrom
       logical name: /dev/sr0
       version: 1.00
       capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw dvd dvd-r dvd-ram
       configuration: ansiversion=5 status=open
  *-disk:0
       description: SCSI Disk
       product: Virtual disk
       vendor: VMware
       physical id: 0.0.0
       bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/sda
       version: 2.0
       size: 60GiB (64GB)
       capabilities: gpt-1.00 partitioned partitioned:gpt
       configuration: ansiversion=6 guid=491452eb-c164-4724-bd11-f462e3e95a27 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512
  *-disk:1
       description: SCSI Disk
       product: Virtual disk
       vendor: VMware
       physical id: 0.1.0
       bus info: scsi@0:0.1.0
       logical name: /dev/sdb
       version: 2.0
       size: 100GiB (107GB)
       capabilities: gpt-1.00 partitioned partitioned:gpt
       configuration: ansiversion=6 guid=02c96157-7141-4b33-8137-0064b3c8fef2 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512

Another handy command to find specific storage device info in Linux is:

sudo smartctl -i /dev/sdb (or your device name)

You should get a similar output to this one:

smartctl 7.1 2019-12-30 r5022 [x86_64-linux-4.18.0-477.21.1.el8_8.x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-19, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor:               VMware
Product:              Virtual disk
Revision:             2.0
Compliance:           SPC-4
User Capacity:        107,374,182,400 bytes [107 GB]
Logical block size:   512 bytes
LU is thin provisioned, LBPRZ=1
Rotation Rate:        Solid State Device
Device type:          disk
Local Time is:        Wed Jul 23 10:04:27 2025 CDT
SMART support is:     Unavailable - device lacks SMART capability.

Finally, if you just want to find out if the storage device in you Linux box is Virtual or Physical you can use:

cat /sys/block/sdb/device/model

For this Linux box the output was:

Virtual disk

I’m sure there are many other commands to find information about the storage devices attached to your Linux server. You can share them in the comments section if you like. Thank you and have a great day!