Samsung Magician driver compatibility issue

Mr Jack · 9 Jun 2021 at 13:39

I popped a shiny new 2Tb Samsung 870 QVO SSD in my PC today, and it seems to work fine, but in Samsung Magician (do I need this, btw, what's it actually doing for me?) it gives me this complaint:

Okay, so I head to that link and download the latest version of the Intel RST drivers, but they tell me they're not compatible with my hardware. Huh. Useful. Anyone seen this before? Got any idea what I should be doing?

mattyfez · 9 Jun 2021 at 13:55

I can't answer the main question regarding drivers, but Samsung magician isn't essential. Handy if you need to update the firmware on the drive but that's pretty much it.
If you run a 3rd party hard disk benchmark and it's running as expected for that model then I'd just leave it at that.
I've a Samsung QVO 1tb drive for media storage and it's fine, although they can slow down during continuous sustained writing excersises as the onboard cache fills up which some say is the weakness of the QVO drives... But I guess that's why the QVO are cheaper than the EVO models.

Mr Jack · 9 Jun 2021 at 14:07

Thanks, there was a firmware update for my drive, so I guess it was worth installing anyway

Steampunk · 9 Jun 2021 at 14:15

Mr Jack said:
I popped a shiny new 2Tb Samsung 870 QVO SSD in my PC today, and it seems to work fine, but in Samsung Magician (do I need this, btw, what's it actually doing for me?) it gives me this complaint:

Okay, so I head to that link and download the latest version of the Intel RST drivers, but they tell me they're not compatible with my hardware. Huh. Useful. Anyone seen this before? Got any idea what I should be doing?

It means that Samsung Magician can't talk to the drive through the Intel RST Raid Drivers you have installed. You need to use AHCI mode/drivers. A lot of general disk utilities have this issue, not just Samsung. It's interesting that it's recommends downloading the latest Intel RST drivers. Either Magician needs newer drivers, or it's just a standard response to go look for the latest drivers, and it won't make any difference because they are not AHCI.

Mr Jack · 9 Jun 2021 at 14:18

Steampunk said:
It means that Samsung Magician can't talk to the drive through the Intel RST Raid Drivers you have installed. You need to use AHCI mode/drivers. A lot of general disk utilities have this issue, not just Samsung. It's interesting that it's recommends downloading the latest Intel RST drivers. Either Magician needs newer drivers, or it's just a standard response to go look for the latest drivers, and it won't make any difference because they are not AHCI.

Cool, thanks. Where do I switch things to AHCI? Is that a BIOS setting?

Edit: Actually, I think I'm already running as AHCI, it's got the "Intel (R) 100 Series/C230 Chipset Family SATA AHCI Controller" installed with the version number given. I think it's just sending me to the wrong place to get new drivers.

Mr Jack · 9 Jun 2021 at 14:37

Okay: solved.

I downloaded the Intel Driver & Support assistant and it then recognised and installed the wanted drivers, which was actually one of the RST drivers. It's just that the more recent RST drivers don't include support for the older chipsets, and the page it directs you to doesn't bother including any of the older versions in its list of things to download.

Steampunk · 9 Jun 2021 at 15:54

Mr Jack said:
Cool, thanks. Where do I switch things to AHCI? Is that a BIOS setting?

Yes, it's a BIOS setting. You'll have a choice of IDE/AHCI/RAID.

Mr Jack said:
Edit: Actually, I think I'm already running as AHCI, it's got the "Intel (R) 100 Series/C230 Chipset Family SATA AHCI Controller" installed with the version number given. I think it's just sending me to the wrong place to get new drivers.

That just means you've got that controller on the motherboard, not that it's running in AHCI mode. You need to change a setting on the BIOS, but make sure you're not running something like RAID 0 on two drives that will be very unhappy if you switch to AHCI. You may lose all your data.

Mr Jack · 9 Jun 2021 at 15:57

I don't remember which it is in, but I can't think I'd have put it on anything other than AHCI when setting it up. I'm not using RAID for anything on this PC. I'll check later when I've finished work.

Steampunk · 9 Jun 2021 at 16:07

Mr Jack said:
I don't remember which it is in, but I can't think I'd have put it on anything other than AHCI when setting it up. I'm not using RAID for anything on this PC. I'll check later when I've finished work.

You can run the IRST drivers with the BIOS in RAID mode even if you're not actually doing any RAID and just running everything as individual disks. IIRC, IRST is a superset of AHCI, so you won't notice it in that mode until you have apps like Magician that expect AHCI try to interrogate it at a low level.

In that case, you should be able to just change the setting the in the BIOS from RAID to AHCI, and Windows will load the correct drivers and run fine with that.

Mr Jack · 9 Jun 2021 at 17:02

As I suspected it, it was set to AHCI and all seems fine. It was just Magician leading me astray. Speaking of Magician leading me astray, can anyone explain what the bars on Magician's benchmarking are saying? Why is it showing a shorter bar for a number that is 4x higher!?

pp111 · 15 Jun 2021 at 10:42

Samsung Magician doesn't really do a lot unless you want to update the firmware or implement some of features such as SSD Over-Provisioning. I mean I have mine disabled because I just don't want any of the features it offers.