Soldato
How is it? I'm close to buying an 840 pro however i've seen some bad reports about the software.
I haven't got a samsung SSD?
Magician only works properly if you're running in AHCI mode.
That's a good point. It also means that the majority of Samsung SSD owners will be able to use the Magician software.
Yes, but if you're not using AHCI (a lot of people run RAID of one sort or another), Magician gives no added value despite the Samsung price premium for such niceties as the Magician software.
It's worth knowing as it can influence your buying decision when so many other good drives (such as the Toshibas) cost significantly less, but don't give you nice software utilities.
I have a Samsung SSD, but if I'd known Magician was going to be so useless to me, I would probably have paid less and got something else.
We don't really know the price premium for the Magician software, but I expect it doesn't add too much to the price of a Samsung SSD, maybe a couple of quid ?
The Samsung 840 non-pros are some of the cheapest SSDs available. Yes, I know they use "cheap" TLC memory, but my experience with them has been good.
To Samsung, no, but they use this to justify a price premium over similarly specced products.
Their Pros are significanly more expensive whilst offering similar performance to competitor products. One of the reasons they can do this is the high praise Samsung SSDs get in reviews because they provide extras like Samsung Magician and a longer warranty.
Oh, and another thing is a lot of people have reported that Samsung Magician stops drives from spinning down and systems going to sleep. It's a deliberate thing by Samsung, supposedly because some systems cause data corruption when you try to put it to sleep with a Samsung SSD. It means you can't run Magician all the time in the background, which is it's default installation.
It's easy to disable it under msconfig, or ignore if you never want to sleep your system, but it's another Magician thing that doesn't quite live up to it's promise. Like the five year warranty that only covers up to 40 gigs of writes a day, it's a bit disappointing to discover the small print under the big headlines.
Like the five year warranty that only covers up to 40 gigs of writes a day, it's a bit disappointing to discover the small print under the big headlines.
I think Samsung are sensible to have a limit on average data writes, as it prevents users "hammering" their SSDs and claiming replacements when they fail. An average of 40 gigs per day is hardly "mean", is it ?
It's hardly great either, especially in the face of the publicised five year warranty. It's just another little thing you learn when you're an owner that takes the shine off the specs and the great reviews. It pretends that Samsung have a lot of faith in their product and that it will last a long time, whereas in the small print they say "not really".
I'm just letting the OP know the things that I've discovered as a relatively new Samsung SSD owner that will allow him to make a more informed decision based on the not-so-good stuff as well as all the good stuff. As always, YMMV depending if any of this stuff is important to you or not.
I wished someone had told me all this stuff, so by having it here in the forum, maybe it helps the OP and anyone else that comes along afterwards.
My personal issues with my Samsung's SSD:
1. It doesn't work properly with Intel Rapid Start. I think this is related to the same caching/flushing issue that makes Samsung try to stop your system sleeping.
2. The much-praised Magician software is mostly worthless if you run anything not AHCI.
For a premium brand, I was expecting better. Again, you may not care about this if it doesn't affect you, but it's worth knowing about to make a considered choice.