How to get serial number from Mac hard disks?

Question

Is there an easy way to get the serial number of all the hard disks in a Mac using an API?

Basically, I'm looking for a unique identifier for the hard disk with which I can figure out whether the hard disk has been used (or referred to) by my application or not.

Please let me know if there is any other solution.

Note: I need this solution for 10.4 and above.

Answer 1

The following will list the serial numbers on the SATA-bus. You don't get to know which device it is as is but you can do it with some scripting/parsing. I've used "sed" to remove all the spaces and "awk" to isolate just the serial in case you are not familiar:

$ system_profiler SPSerialATADataType -detailLevel medium | grep Serial | sed -e 's/[\<\>\"\ ]//g' | -F':' '{print $2}'

Answer 2

From the command line:

ioreg -rd1 -w0 -c AppleAHCIDiskDriver | grep Serial

This gives you the serial number of the built-in hard disk.