How to detect SSD in Mac OS X?

Question

Is there a reliable, quick, deterministic way (i.e. not a benchmark) to check whether the system drive Mac OS X is on is a Solid State Drive?

Is there any other

Answer 1

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