Physical Disks & Disk Health Inventory

For every managed machine, Athena inventories the physical drives installed in it — model and serial number, media type (SSD, HDD or NVMe), the interface the drive is attached through, capacity, firmware version, how many partitions it carries, and a reported health status. That gives you a fleet-wide view of your storage estate — for example which machines still run spinning disks, which drives are near end of life, or which report a warning — without opening a case or logging in to each device.

What's collected#

Each physical disk record captures the following:

Reading the health status#

The Health value is a normalized summary of what the drive itself reports, so you can scan a fleet for trouble without interpreting raw diagnostics per machine:

A drive can legitimately report Unknown — for example on hardware or drivers that don't surface a health value, or where the reading requires privileges the agent doesn't have. Treat Warning and Unhealthy as your action list, and use Unknown as a signal to check that specific machine more closely if the drive matters.

Platform coverage#

Physical disks are inventoried on both Windows and Linux endpoints, using each operating system's own native facilities, so a mixed fleet answers the same questions consistently. The exact fields a given machine can populate depend on what its hardware and drivers expose.

Where to see it#

Open a machine from the Agents list, then in the agent detail view's left-hand navigation choose Physical Disks. The section lists every drive in a table with its media type and health shown as coloured badges, so a machine with a warning or an ageing spinning disk stands out at a glance.

As with the rest of inventory, the values reflect the machine's last successful collection on its regular reporting cadence rather than a live query at open time. For the wider inventory surface and refresh behaviour, see Inventory.

Auditing across the fleet#

Physical-disk fields are a per-machine readout rather than machine-filter fields, so you won't find them in the collection or automatic-tagging field pickers. To answer a fleet-wide question — "which machines have a drive reporting Warning or Unhealthy?", "which still run HDDs?", or "which drives are on old firmware?" — the practical approaches are:

• Open the machines you care about and read the Physical Disks section directly for a quick, targeted check.
• Run a scan or use a compliance rule to evaluate a disk condition on the endpoint and surface the result — which you can then use in collections, tagging and reports like any other scan-derived field.
• Pull the data over the API and filter or export it with your own tooling.

Reading it over the API#

Physical disks are part of an agent's full inventory. Fetch the complete inventory document and read the physicalDisks array:

# Fetch the full inventory for one agent, then inspect its physical drives
$headers = @{ Authorization = "Bearer $token" }

$inv = Invoke-RestMethod `
  -Uri "https://athena.example.com:8443/api/agents/$agentId/inventory" `
  -Headers $headers `
  -SkipCertificateCheck

# List each drive with its media type, health and firmware
$inv.data.physicalDisks |
  Select-Object diskNumber, model, mediaType, interfaceType, healthStatus, firmwareVersion

# Flag any drive not reporting Healthy
$inv.data.physicalDisks |
  Where-Object { $_.healthStatus -ne "Healthy" }

Reading inventory requires the Helpdesk role or higher. The physicalDisks array is empty (or the parent inventory is null) when a machine has not yet reported this data. There is no dedicated per-category endpoint for physical disks — they arrive with the full inventory document above. For the full inventory surface and the PowerShell module used to script against the server, see Inventory and the PowerShell Module reference.