How to view information on your Linux devices with lshw

While far from being one of the first 50 Linux commands anyone learns, the lshw command (read as “ls hardware”) can provide a lot of useful details on your system’s hardware.

It extracts details—maybe quite a few more than you knew were available—in a format that is reasonably easy to digest. Given descriptions, logical (device) names, sizes, etc., you are likely to appreciate how much detail you can access.

This post examines the information that lshw provides with a particular focus on disk and related hardware. Here is some sample lshw output:

$ sudo lshw -C disk
  *-disk:0
       description: SCSI Disk
       product: Card Reader-1
       vendor: JIE LI
       physical id: 0.0.0
       bus info: scsi@4:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/sdc
       version: 1.00
       capabilities: removable
       configuration: logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512
     *-medium
          physical id: 0
          logical name: /dev/sdc

Note that you should run the lshw command with sudo to ensure that you get all of the available details.

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Thanks to Sandra Henry-Stocker (see source)