Inspecting the drives on the local PC using C# .NET

It’s very simple to enumerate the drives on a Windows computer. The DriveInfo object has a GetDrives static method which returns an array of DriveInfo objects. A DriveInfo describes a drive through its properties. It is similar to the FileInfo class which in turn describes a file.

There are some properties that can only be extracted if the drive is ready, e.g. a CD-Rom drive. The following method prints the available drives:

DriveInfo[] drives = DriveInfo.GetDrives();
foreach (DriveInfo drive in drives)
{
	Console.WriteLine("Drive name: {0}", drive.Name);
	if (drive.IsReady)
	{
		Console.WriteLine("Total size: {0}", drive.TotalSize);
		Console.WriteLine("Total free space: {0}", drive.TotalFreeSpace);
		Console.WriteLine("Available free space: {0}", drive.AvailableFreeSpace);
		Console.WriteLine("Drive format: {0}", drive.DriveFormat);
	}
	else
	{
		Console.WriteLine("Device {0} is not ready.", drive.Name);									
	}
	Console.WriteLine("Drive type: {0}", drive.DriveType);	
}

I got the following output:

DriveType can have the following values:

• CDRom: an optical drive such as a CD-ROM, DVD etc.
• Fixed: a fixed disk, quite often labelled as “C:\”
• Network: a mapped drive
• NoRootDirectory: a drive with no root directory
• Ram: a RAM drive
• Removable: a removable drive such as a pen-drive
• Unknown: a drive whose type could not be determined

Read all posts dedicated to file I/O here.