[section_title title=”Samsung Magician”]Samsung Magician
The Samsung SSD Magician software provides Samsung SSD users with an easy to use selection of tools which can be used for maintenance purposes such as updating the firmware of the SSD to the latest version, it also provides users with advanced features like SSD performance management, a benchmarking suite to make sure your Samsung SSD is performing correctly and also provides operating system optimisation.
It comes free with all new Samsung SSDs and the latest version can be downloaded here.
After installing the Samsung Magician software and opening it up, I was greeted with the following screen. This is basically an overview of a combination of things; drive information, system information and an included performance test.
Like myself, I am using multiple Samsung SSDs which are supported by the software so to select which one you want to get information about, you simply select it from the drop down menu at the top.
One of the good things about this particular software suite is the performance optimisation function. This allows you to not only optimise your SSD for your current operating system, but it allows you to ensure TRIM is enabled.
The OS Optimization feature also allows you to enable/disable certain features such as prefetch/superfetch which are not used with SSDs anyway; a function I’m sure most users will make the most of.
The main selling point in my personal opinion of the Samsung 840/850 drives is the ability to use RAPID mode. What this essentially does is allows the SSD to use DRAM caching technology which gives an insane amount of read speed performance while using a portion of your system memory.
Now it is worth noting that if you use multiple Samsung SSDs like I do, you can only enable RAPID on one drive which is quite disappointing; still a nice feature to have which is essentially free!
Overall the Samsung Magician software is a breeze to use, has a very nice GUI and runs very sweetly. In effect it offers the same sort of thing as the Corsair toolkit, but I feel Samsung have done a better job of it and of course, RAPID mode is included with Samsung Magician making it a very desirable piece of software.
Please note that Samsung Magician only works with Samsung SSDs and will not work with SSDs from other brands/manufacturers.
