How to check if my HD is case sensitive or not?

Solution 1:

You can use terminal to read the File System Personality:

diskutil info /

Look for the fields named below:

   File System Personality:  Journaled HFS+
   Type (Bundle):            hfs
   Name (User Visible):      Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

If the file system is case sensitive, you will see Case-sensitive Journaled HFS in the first pasted line and Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) in the third.

Disk Utility will also show you this from the info window for any File System it can see.

Solution 2:

Something like this should work:

Testing

touch abc1
touch abC1
ls ab*

Interpreting Results

1 file - case insensitive
2 files - case sensitive

Solution 3:

Update for El Capitan, see the attached screen shot from Disk Utility's Info-window.

enter image description here

Solution 4:

run diskutil info <device> and your answer will be shown.

File System Personality will reflect one of the known personalities.

If you see: File System Personality: Journaled HFS+ that means it's case insensitive. To answer your question, you want to see File System Personality: Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+.