LabVIEW Idea Exchange

Guy Drew · ‎05-12-2011

It would be great to determine properties of a disk drive i.e. type and size. There have been a number of my applications that would benefit from knowing the difference between a local drive and a network drive. Drive Types are shown below.

It is simple in LabVIEW to get a list of disk drives on a given computer as shown:

There are round about ways to get drive information such as command prompt and the system exec.vi and registry vi’s. These methods require a lot of overhead and programming. There is currently no simple function in LabVIEW that I can find that will return the properties of a disk drive.

This idea is more of a request for National Instruments to include a new VI that will get Properties of a Disk Drive. This new VI should be similar to the existing Get File Info VIs.

AristosQueue (NI) · ‎05-13-2011

This is purely MY opinion. I'm not speaking for anyone else in R&D, NI or the LV community.

Hm... there are some APIs that I think should become part of LV. There are others that I think are best left to users to call whatever vendor-specific DLLs exist. This, to me, falls in the latter category. This sounds like the sort of API that shifts constantly across different operating systems and different revs of operating systems, which means its a major support burden for NI. I cannot believe that this API would be used often enough to justify the expense. Now, I don't know much about disk standards, but my guess is that these would vary widly across different systems. Am I right? Whatever you're doing that requires you to query disk attributes is probably specific to a particular setup -- maybe some raid configuration you're doing or somesuch -- and I doubt a general "works on any system" API would be of value to you. Which means NI taking the time to build such a general API wouldn't actually be buying much.

Guy Drew · ‎05-19-2011

Finding the property of a disk drive turned out to be easier than I thought once I knew the location and call.