How to detect SSD in Mac OS X?

This only seems possible for internal drives. I could not find a way using IOKit to query a Samsung T5 external USB 3 SSD for its SSD-ness (nor a Toshiba Canvio USB HDDD). I did manage for the internal drive in my MBP, though.

Disk utility also doesn’t think the Samsung is an SSD, so that makes me think there may not be a way, other than to measure actual performance.

Actually, I think you should go the benchmarking route, because it more accurately answers your question - you don't really care that the disk happens to be an SSD, you just care that the disk is really fast. What if the user is using a fast RAID setup, or a Fiber Channel array, or is using iSCSI?

Just read a bunch of random sectors from the underlying /dev/diskX and if it meets your requirements you can treat it as a "Fast" drive

If you're trying to get that kind of information, you're best guess is IOKit.

You can try some of it's functionality using the ioreg command line tool or the IORegistryExplorer.

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Here's some code that might help you. It fetches all hard drives that aren't a RAID and aren't partitions. This isn't what you want, but it might get you started.

#import "TWDevice.h"

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <sys/ioctl.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <paths.h>
#include <sys/param.h>
#include <IOKit/IOKitLib.h>
#include <IOKit/IOBSD.h>
#include <IOKit/storage/IOMedia.h>
#include <CoreFoundation/CoreFoundation.h>
#include <IOKit/Kext/KextManager.h>


@implementation TWDevice

@synthesize name, devicePath, size, blockSize, writable, icon;

+ (NSArray *)allDevices {
    // create matching dictionary
    CFMutableDictionaryRef classesToMatch;
    classesToMatch = IOServiceMatching(kIOMediaClass);
    if (classesToMatch == NULL) {
        [NSException raise:@"TWError" format:@"Classes to match could not be created"];
    }

    // get iterator of matching services
    io_iterator_t mediaIterator;
    kern_return_t kernResult;
    kernResult = IOServiceGetMatchingServices(kIOMasterPortDefault,
                                                                      classesToMatch,
                                                                      &mediaIterator);

    if (kernResult != KERN_SUCCESS) {
        [NSException raise:@"TWError" format:@"Matching services did not succed."];
    }

    // iterate over all found medias
    io_object_t nextMedia;
    NSMutableArray *detectedDevices = [NSMutableArray array];
    while (nextMedia = IOIteratorNext(mediaIterator)) {
        NSMutableDictionary *properties;
        kernResult = IORegistryEntryCreateCFProperties(nextMedia,
                                                                                  (CFMutableDictionaryRef *)&properties,
                                                                                  kCFAllocatorDefault, 0);

        if (kernResult != KERN_SUCCESS) {
            [NSException raise:@"TWError" format:@"Getting properties threw error."];
        }

        // is it a whole device or just a partition?
        if ([[properties valueForKey:@"Whole"] boolValue] &&
            ![[properties valueForKey:@"RAID"] boolValue]) {
            TWDevice *device = [[[TWDevice alloc] init] autorelease];

            device.devicePath = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%sr%@", _PATH_DEV, [properties valueForKey:@"BSD Name"]];
            device.blockSize = [[properties valueForKey:@"Preferred Block Size"] unsignedLongLongValue];
            device.writable = [[properties valueForKey:@"Writable"] boolValue];
            device.size = [[properties valueForKey:@"Size"] unsignedLongLongValue];

            io_name_t name;
            IORegistryEntryGetName(nextMedia, name);
            device.name = [NSString stringWithCString:name encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding];

            …

            [detectedDevices addObject:device];
        }

        // tidy up
        IOObjectRelease(nextMedia);
        CFRelease(properties);
    }
    IOObjectRelease(mediaIterator);

    return detectedDevices;
}

@end