How to see what ports the hard drives are connected to

firewirestoragethunderboltusb

2011 iMac running Mavericks

I have a number of hard drives on my machine, including a standard internal drive, an external SSD on Thunderbolt, a standard external drive on thunderbolt, a standard external drive on Firewire, and a standard external drive on USB.

What I'm not sure of without crawling around and tracking cables and other investigative work, is which volume on my computer goes with which drive, and therefore which connection technology. It's just been too long since I set it all up.

I thought for sure this information would be in Disk Utility, but it seems it's not (or I can't find it). Then I thought for sure it would be in System Profiler (System Information) but it's not (or I can't find it).

How can I find out which connection technology is being used by each volume on my machine?

EDIT: I was able to deduce which drive had to be which from process of elimination, since I found that System Information will show me (under the Thunderbolt heading) which drives are Thunderbolt, and I know from the sizes which drives they must be. Still I would really like to have a simple direct way to figure this out for the future, if possible.

Best Answer

You should be able to find this information in the System Information Utility. Did you try looking under Storage then selecting each of the listed items? On my system running 10.10.5 each of my connected external drives was listed and clicking on each showed what type of connection it was on under the Protocol type. Hope that helps.