Issue with new Samsung Magician

I'm using 256GB Samsung SSD 840 Pro as C disks on my Win 7 Pro SP1
64-bit machines. Samsung Magician software has been loaded on all of
them. I recently updated Magician on one machine from Version 4.x.y to
Version 5.0.0. The GUI interface is totally different.

The most important difference, to me, is that there is no mention or
control of "over-partitioning" in the GUI or any discussion in the
documentation I could find. My C disk dedicated the default 10% (about
24GB) to this task. That dedication was set up while running Version
4.x.y. My question is whether I can take that 24GB and merge it with the
usable part of my C disk now that I'm using Version 5.0.0?

I searched for information and some opinions were that Samsung no longer
believes that over-partitioning is necessary (in Win 10?) but I could
find no Samsung statement to that effect nor any described method to
safely reclaim that previously dedicate chunk of the SSD. Samsung phone
support is mostly useless - ask the same question twice and get at least
two different answers.

Does anyone of you know 1) what is going on with the Samsung Magician,
2) does Version 5.0.0 still use disk for over-partitioning, or 3) if
not, how to reclaim and use the now wasted space?

TIA
--
Jeff Barnett

On Sun, 25 Jun 2017 11:38:42 -0600, Jeff Barnett wrote:

Does anyone of you know 1) what is going on with the Samsung Magician,
2) does Version 5.0.0 still use disk for over-partitioning, or 3) if
not, how to reclaim and use the now wasted space?

V5 doesn't use over provisioning and you can see any free space
previously used in storage manager. I used Paragon Hard Disk Manager to
extend my partition to use the space previously reserved for
over-partitioning but any other tools should be able to do it.

--
Faster, cheaper, quieter than HS2
and built in 5 years;
UKUltraspeed http://www.500kmh.com/

Jeff Barnett wrote:

I'm using 256GB Samsung SSD 840 Pro as C disks on my Win 7 Pro SP1
64-bit machines. Samsung Magician software has been loaded on all of
them. I recently updated Magician on one machine from Version 4.x.y to
Version 5.0.0. The GUI interface is totally different.

After installing v5, I found some functions were missing. For example,
the manual TRIM was gone. The OS is supposed to send a TRIM command to
the drive but there is a series of dependencies: the computer has to be
idle for awhile (how long is not specified), the OS has to send the TRIM
command, the driver has to support TRIM (not all do), and the drive has
to support TRIM (not all old SSDs do). I'm using Windows 7 so it should
issue a TRIM command to the SSD when the OS has been idle awhile;
however, my computer remains busy during the day and has scheduled jobs
during the night that it rarely is is idle for long. In fact, most
times the screen saver won't engage (set to timeout after 30 minutes).
I've found no mention on how long the OS or SSD must be idle before the
OS will issue a TRIM command. It may not only be a threshold on idle
but an algorithm that accounts for the number of previously written
memory blocks that are no longer allocated to a file.

I was running in irregular speed problems when writing to the SSD. A
manual TRIM corrected that. However, v5 of Samsung Magician no longer
had the manual TRIM function. Luckily I still had the download of
v4.96, so I uninstalled v5 and went back to v4.96. I discard the v5
download since I won't ever bother installing it again.

If you never downloaded the updates from Samsung to retain for later
use, you'll have to dig out the CD that came with the SSD to install
Magician from there.

I only noticed the loss of manual TRIM in the v5 version of Magician
(when I wanted to test if it helped the slowdown of my SSD which it
did). I did not bother checking if over-provisioning settings were
missing in v5.

The most important difference, to me, is that there is no mention or
control of "over-partitioning" in the GUI or any discussion in the
documentation I could find. My C disk dedicated the default 10% (about
24GB) to this task. That dedication was set up while running Version
4.x.y. My question is whether I can take that 24GB and merge it with the
usable part of my C disk now that I'm using Version 5.0.0?

Over-provisioning (not over-partitioning) has nothing to do with the
software. That is a requirement of the *drive* so it can perform wear
levelling.

http://www.seagate.com/tech-insights...its-master-ti/

TRIM (erasing the previously used memory blocks so they are reusable
again) takes time. It is also not constantly issued. TRIM gets issued
when the drive has been idle for awhile. That means used blocks remain
unusable until sometime later when TRIM is issued and after TRIM has
completed. In the meantime, you still want to write to the SSD so extra
space is needed to mask the TRIMming. If space gets so cramped that you
have to wait for a TRIM to get issued and completed, your SSD will get a
lot slower.

Over-provisioning is also part of wear-levelling. The writes go to the
over-provisioned area (if there is no free space left) rather than
constantly erase a previously used memory block to reuse it and do so
over and over.

https://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/a-...visioning.html
"Over Provisioning (OP) is when a certain percentage of an SSD's free
space has been allocated to help maximize the lifetime, endurance, and
overall performance of the drive itself."
and
"SSD Safeguard - Guaranteed "swap space" acts as a safeguard to make
sure the user doesn't completely fill the drive to ensure there is
sufficient unused capacity available on the SSD and enough idle time to
run TRIM, Garbage Collection, and more."

I'd rather have the far more expensive SSD last longer. I also want the
performance that the more expensive SSD was to afford me. I noticed
when there was a slowdown of the SSD. I used several disk benchmark
tools and found there was irregular slowdowns across the SSD. After a
manual TRIM, the benchmarks all looked good and the SSD was as snappy as
when new.

If the 10% over-provisioning is making free space too tight on the SSD,
you need a bigger SSD. Using up the over-provisioning will slow down
your SSD and you'll just run into the same capacity problem a little
later. After all, you've put so much on the SSD that whatever you
recover will fall victim to your current file management practices,
anyway. Get your data off the SSD. Move your games off the SSD: they
may load faster but they have long been designed to preload data into
memory, like for textures, for better game-play performance.

For my 256GB SSD, over-provisioning is set to 10%. The Kingston article
has a guide on the amount of over-provisioning based on the size of the
SSD and whether intended for mostly reads or mostly writes.

I searched for information and some opinions were that Samsung no longer
believes that over-partitioning is necessary (in Win 10?) but I could
find no Samsung statement to that effect nor any described method to
safely reclaim that previously dedicate chunk of the SSD. Samsung phone
support is mostly useless - ask the same question twice and get at least
two different answers.

Again, over-provisioning has nothing to do with the software. It has to
do with maintaining the performance (no interrupting background TRIMs)
and increasing longevity of the *drive*. Doesn't matter OS you use.
Without over-provisioning, *YOU* would have to always ensure there
remains x% of free space on the SSD so TRIMming was possible. There
must be sufficient free space to prevent write amplification. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification

Leave the over-provisioning set at whatever is the current default. If
you need that space, start moving data and games off the SSD. You'll
get insignicant load times for data files and games are designed to
preload object definitions, tables, and textures into memory (load time
is unimportant versus game-play response). Get a bigger SSD or stop
putting files on it that shouldn't be there.

Does anyone of you know 1) what is going on with the Samsung Magician,
2) does Version 5.0.0 still use disk for over-partitioning, or 3) if
not, how to reclaim and use the now wasted space?

Mentioned above. Go back to version 4.96 (or whatever pre-5 version is
on the CD that came with the SSD).

VanguardLH wrote:

Jeff Barnett wrote:

I'm using 256GB Samsung SSD 840 Pro as C disks on my Win 7 Pro SP1
64-bit machines. Samsung Magician software has been loaded on all of
them. I recently updated Magician on one machine from Version 4.x.y to
Version 5.0.0. The GUI interface is totally different.

After installing v5, I found some functions were missing. For example,
the manual TRIM was gone. The OS is supposed to send a TRIM command to
the drive but there is a series of dependencies: the computer has to be
idle for awhile (how long is not specified), the OS has to send the TRIM
command, the driver has to support TRIM (not all do), and the drive has
to support TRIM (not all old SSDs do). I'm using Windows 7 so it should
issue a TRIM command to the SSD when the OS has been idle awhile;
however, my computer remains busy during the day and has scheduled jobs
during the night that it rarely is is idle for long. In fact, most
times the screen saver won't engage (set to timeout after 30 minutes).
I've found no mention on how long the OS or SSD must be idle before the
OS will issue a TRIM command. It may not only be a threshold on idle
but an algorithm that accounts for the number of previously written
memory blocks that are no longer allocated to a file.

I was running in irregular speed problems when writing to the SSD. A
manual TRIM corrected that. However, v5 of Samsung Magician no longer
had the manual TRIM function. Luckily I still had the download of
v4.96, so I uninstalled v5 and went back to v4.96. I discard the v5
download since I won't ever bother installing it again.

If you never downloaded the updates from Samsung to retain for later
use, you'll have to dig out the CD that came with the SSD to install
Magician from there.

I only noticed the loss of manual TRIM in the v5 version of Magician
(when I wanted to test if it helped the slowdown of my SSD which it
did). I did not bother checking if over-provisioning settings were
missing in v5.

The most important difference, to me, is that there is no mention or
control of "over-partitioning" in the GUI or any discussion in the
documentation I could find. My C disk dedicated the default 10% (about
24GB) to this task. That dedication was set up while running Version
4.x.y. My question is whether I can take that 24GB and merge it with the
usable part of my C disk now that I'm using Version 5.0.0?

Over-provisioning (not over-partitioning) has nothing to do with the
software. That is a requirement of the *drive* so it can perform wear
levelling.

http://www.seagate.com/tech-insights...its-master-ti/

TRIM (erasing the previously used memory blocks so they are reusable
again) takes time. It is also not constantly issued. TRIM gets issued
when the drive has been idle for awhile. That means used blocks remain
unusable until sometime later when TRIM is issued and after TRIM has
completed. In the meantime, you still want to write to the SSD so extra
space is needed to mask the TRIMming. If space gets so cramped that you
have to wait for a TRIM to get issued and completed, your SSD will get a
lot slower.

Over-provisioning is also part of wear-levelling. The writes go to the
over-provisioned area (if there is no free space left) rather than
constantly erase a previously used memory block to reuse it and do so
over and over.

https://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/a-...visioning.html
"Over Provisioning (OP) is when a certain percentage of an SSD's free
space has been allocated to help maximize the lifetime, endurance, and
overall performance of the drive itself."
and
"SSD Safeguard - Guaranteed "swap space" acts as a safeguard to make
sure the user doesn't completely fill the drive to ensure there is
sufficient unused capacity available on the SSD and enough idle time to
run TRIM, Garbage Collection, and more."

I'd rather have the far more expensive SSD last longer. I also want the
performance that the more expensive SSD was to afford me. I noticed
when there was a slowdown of the SSD. I used several disk benchmark
tools and found there was irregular slowdowns across the SSD. After a
manual TRIM, the benchmarks all looked good and the SSD was as snappy as
when new.

If the 10% over-provisioning is making free space too tight on the SSD,
you need a bigger SSD. Using up the over-provisioning will slow down
your SSD and you'll just run into the same capacity problem a little
later. After all, you've put so much on the SSD that whatever you
recover will fall victim to your current file management practices,
anyway. Get your data off the SSD. Move your games off the SSD: they
may load faster but they have long been designed to preload data into
memory, like for textures, for better game-play performance.

For my 256GB SSD, over-provisioning is set to 10%. The Kingston article
has a guide on the amount of over-provisioning based on the size of the
SSD and whether intended for mostly reads or mostly writes.

I searched for information and some opinions were that Samsung no longer
believes that over-partitioning is necessary (in Win 10?) but I could
find no Samsung statement to that effect nor any described method to
safely reclaim that previously dedicate chunk of the SSD. Samsung phone
support is mostly useless - ask the same question twice and get at least
two different answers.

Again, over-provisioning has nothing to do with the software. It has to
do with maintaining the performance (no interrupting background TRIMs)
and increasing longevity of the *drive*. Doesn't matter OS you use.
Without over-provisioning, *YOU* would have to always ensure there
remains x% of free space on the SSD so TRIMming was possible. There
must be sufficient free space to prevent write amplification. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification

Leave the over-provisioning set at whatever is the current default. If
you need that space, start moving data and games off the SSD. You'll
get insignicant load times for data files and games are designed to
preload object definitions, tables, and textures into memory (load time
is unimportant versus game-play response). Get a bigger SSD or stop
putting files on it that shouldn't be there.

Does anyone of you know 1) what is going on with the Samsung Magician,
2) does Version 5.0.0 still use disk for over-partitioning, or 3) if
not, how to reclaim and use the now wasted space?

Mentioned above. Go back to version 4.96 (or whatever pre-5 version is
on the CD that came with the SSD).

In addition, whether for v4 or v5, Magician wants to leave itself
loaded. There is no reason to do so. Samsung just wants to advertise
themself in your system tray. I use the following batch file to load
Magician. Upon exiting Magician, I tap a key in the command shell to
make sure it gets killed. There is no graceful exit/unload option in
Magician.

--- Batch file ---

@echo off
cls

echo Loading Samsung Magician ...
start "Samsung Magician" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Samsung\Samsung Magician\Samsung Magician.exe"

echo.
echo Samsung Magician remains loaded even after exiting its window.
echo After exiting its window, hit a key to kill the program ...
pause nul

echo.
echo Forcing exit of Samsung Magician (not needed for Rapid that runs as a service) ...
taskkill.exe /im "Samsung Magician.exe" /f

echo.
echo -DONE-
echo.

Rodney Pont wrote on 6/25/2017 1:59 PM:
On Sun, 25 Jun 2017 11:38:42 -0600, Jeff Barnett wrote:

Does anyone of you know 1) what is going on with the Samsung Magician,
2) does Version 5.0.0 still use disk for over-partitioning, or 3) if
not, how to reclaim and use the now wasted space?

V5 doesn't use over provisioning and you can see any free space
previously used in storage manager. I used Paragon Hard Disk Manager to
extend my partition to use the space previously reserved for
over-partitioning but any other tools should be able to do it.

Thanks for the info. Any reason you didn't just use the Windows "Disk
Management" interface to reclaim the space?
--
Jeff Barnett

VanguardLH wrote on 6/25/2017 2:19 PM:
VanguardLH wrote:

Jeff Barnett wrote:

I'm using 256GB Samsung SSD 840 Pro as C disks on my Win 7 Pro SP1
64-bit machines. Samsung Magician software has been loaded on all of
them. I recently updated Magician on one machine from Version 4.x.y to
Version 5.0.0. The GUI interface is totally different.

After installing v5, I found some functions were missing. For example,
the manual TRIM was gone. The OS is supposed to send a TRIM command to
the drive but there is a series of dependencies: the computer has to be
idle for awhile (how long is not specified), the OS has to send the TRIM
command, the driver has to support TRIM (not all do), and the drive has
to support TRIM (not all old SSDs do). I'm using Windows 7 so it should
issue a TRIM command to the SSD when the OS has been idle awhile;
however, my computer remains busy during the day and has scheduled jobs
during the night that it rarely is is idle for long. In fact, most
times the screen saver won't engage (set to timeout after 30 minutes).
I've found no mention on how long the OS or SSD must be idle before the
OS will issue a TRIM command. It may not only be a threshold on idle
but an algorithm that accounts for the number of previously written
memory blocks that are no longer allocated to a file.

I was running in irregular speed problems when writing to the SSD. A
manual TRIM corrected that. However, v5 of Samsung Magician no longer
had the manual TRIM function. Luckily I still had the download of
v4.96, so I uninstalled v5 and went back to v4.96. I discard the v5
download since I won't ever bother installing it again.

If you never downloaded the updates from Samsung to retain for later
use, you'll have to dig out the CD that came with the SSD to install
Magician from there.

I only noticed the loss of manual TRIM in the v5 version of Magician
(when I wanted to test if it helped the slowdown of my SSD which it
did). I did not bother checking if over-provisioning settings were
missing in v5.

The most important difference, to me, is that there is no mention or
control of "over-partitioning" in the GUI or any discussion in the
documentation I could find. My C disk dedicated the default 10% (about
24GB) to this task. That dedication was set up while running Version
4.x.y. My question is whether I can take that 24GB and merge it with the
usable part of my C disk now that I'm using Version 5.0.0?

Over-provisioning (not over-partitioning) has nothing to do with the
software. That is a requirement of the *drive* so it can perform wear
levelling.

http://www.seagate.com/tech-insights...its-master-ti/

TRIM (erasing the previously used memory blocks so they are reusable
again) takes time. It is also not constantly issued. TRIM gets issued
when the drive has been idle for awhile. That means used blocks remain
unusable until sometime later when TRIM is issued and after TRIM has
completed. In the meantime, you still want to write to the SSD so extra
space is needed to mask the TRIMming. If space gets so cramped that you
have to wait for a TRIM to get issued and completed, your SSD will get a
lot slower.

Over-provisioning is also part of wear-levelling. The writes go to the
over-provisioned area (if there is no free space left) rather than
constantly erase a previously used memory block to reuse it and do so
over and over.

https://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/a-...visioning.html
"Over Provisioning (OP) is when a certain percentage of an SSD's free
space has been allocated to help maximize the lifetime, endurance, and
overall performance of the drive itself."
and
"SSD Safeguard - Guaranteed "swap space" acts as a safeguard to make
sure the user doesn't completely fill the drive to ensure there is
sufficient unused capacity available on the SSD and enough idle time to
run TRIM, Garbage Collection, and more."

I'd rather have the far more expensive SSD last longer. I also want the
performance that the more expensive SSD was to afford me. I noticed
when there was a slowdown of the SSD. I used several disk benchmark
tools and found there was irregular slowdowns across the SSD. After a
manual TRIM, the benchmarks all looked good and the SSD was as snappy as
when new.

If the 10% over-provisioning is making free space too tight on the SSD,
you need a bigger SSD. Using up the over-provisioning will slow down
your SSD and you'll just run into the same capacity problem a little
later. After all, you've put so much on the SSD that whatever you
recover will fall victim to your current file management practices,
anyway. Get your data off the SSD. Move your games off the SSD: they
may load faster but they have long been designed to preload data into
memory, like for textures, for better game-play performance.

For my 256GB SSD, over-provisioning is set to 10%. The Kingston article
has a guide on the amount of over-provisioning based on the size of the
SSD and whether intended for mostly reads or mostly writes.

I searched for information and some opinions were that Samsung no longer
believes that over-partitioning is necessary (in Win 10?) but I could
find no Samsung statement to that effect nor any described method to
safely reclaim that previously dedicate chunk of the SSD. Samsung phone
support is mostly useless - ask the same question twice and get at least
two different answers.

Again, over-provisioning has nothing to do with the software. It has to
do with maintaining the performance (no interrupting background TRIMs)
and increasing longevity of the *drive*. Doesn't matter OS you use.
Without over-provisioning, *YOU* would have to always ensure there
remains x% of free space on the SSD so TRIMming was possible. There
must be sufficient free space to prevent write amplification. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification

Leave the over-provisioning set at whatever is the current default. If
you need that space, start moving data and games off the SSD. You'll
get insignicant load times for data files and games are designed to
preload object definitions, tables, and textures into memory (load time
is unimportant versus game-play response). Get a bigger SSD or stop
putting files on it that shouldn't be there.

Does anyone of you know 1) what is going on with the Samsung Magician,
2) does Version 5.0.0 still use disk for over-partitioning, or 3) if
not, how to reclaim and use the now wasted space?

Mentioned above. Go back to version 4.96 (or whatever pre-5 version is
on the CD that came with the SSD).

In addition, whether for v4 or v5, Magician wants to leave itself
loaded. There is no reason to do so. Samsung just wants to advertise
themself in your system tray. I use the following batch file to load
Magician. Upon exiting Magician, I tap a key in the command shell to
make sure it gets killed. There is no graceful exit/unload option in
Magician.

--- Batch file ---

@echo off
cls

echo Loading Samsung Magician ...
start "Samsung Magician" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Samsung\Samsung Magician\Samsung Magician.exe"

echo.
echo Samsung Magician remains loaded even after exiting its window.
echo After exiting its window, hit a key to kill the program ...
pause nul

echo.
echo Forcing exit of Samsung Magician (not needed for Rapid that runs as a service) ...
taskkill.exe /im "Samsung Magician.exe" /f

echo.
echo -DONE-
echo.

There is a lot of information in your two replies. I however am having
difficulty deciding what I should do based on that information.

You say that over-provisioning is not a software thing but given that
Magician and Win OS have to cooperate in the allocation renders that
statement somewhat moot. The Version 4 Magician, in fact, had controls
of that feature but 5 doesn't. Is your recommendation, with Version 5,
to leave the unallocated space as is?

I'm not sure what you are talking about with "manual" trim. With the
prior Magician, I was simply told that trim was on; I was given no
options to control that feature.
--
Jeff Barnett

On Sun, 25 Jun 2017 14:42:03 -0600, Jeff Barnett wrote:

snip Vangguard's v. useful info.

There is a lot of information in your two replies. I however am having
difficulty deciding what I should do based on that information.

You say that over-provisioning is not a software thing but given that
Magician and Win OS have to cooperate in the allocation renders that
statement somewhat moot. The Version 4 Magician, in fact, had controls
of that feature but 5 doesn't. Is your recommendation, with Version 5,
to leave the unallocated space as is?

An SSD certainly needs unallocated space - I might have overdone it a tad as
I've a Samsung 512GB 850 Pro and it has 194GB for that! There's still more
room than I'll need for the forseeable future.

I'm not sure what you are talking about with "manual" trim. With the
prior Magician, I was simply told that trim was on; I was given no
options to control that feature.

When I cloned the HGST HDD to the SSD (using Macrium Reflect Free - and it
booted and worked perfectly) there was an option to enable TRIM.
The version of Magician (4.something) that was on the CD worked well, but I
foolishly updated to 5.1. That had far less functionality and wanted to get
out to t'net; it also said that it didn't support my drive, although it's
supposed to.
I didn't see any option for TRIM in v5, but it was such a nuisance that I
uninstalled it. Being on W7 Pro, SP1, I'm not confident in the OS handling
things.

BTW, I saw an article recently that claimed V4 to have some sort of
vulnarability - another reason to keep it in-house, and shut down most of
the time.


--
Peter.
The gods will stay away
whilst religions hold sway

Jeff Barnett wrote:

You say that over-provisioning is not a software thing but given that
Magician and Win OS have to cooperate in the allocation renders that
statement somewhat moot. The Version 4 Magician, in fact, had controls
of that feature but 5 doesn't. Is your recommendation, with Version 5,
to leave the unallocated space as is?

The software doesn't say where on the SSD the data will be written.
Allocation units (clusters) are a property of the file system. The
drive decides where will be those AUs. Wear-levelling means the AUs can
change to which memory blocks in the drive they belong. The file system
and OS will never know which physcial memory blocks are used for a
particular AU. There is the logical layout that the OS knows and there
is the physical layout that the drive knows. That an AU is mapped to a
particular LBA sector address does NOT equate to which memory block the
AU is currently using in the physical media.

Over-provisioning has the *drive* perform new writes into the
over-provision area if there is insufficient free space in the
non-provisioned area. Without over-provisioning, and when free space is
small or neglible, the OS would have to keep issuing TRIM commands on
every write so previously written blocks get erased and become eligible
for reuse. Writing to SSDs requires erase before write. Erasing takes
time and interrupts the write.

My recommendation is you go back to version 4.96 of Samsung Magician.
Not only does the old version have a manual TRIM function (called
Performance Optimization) but also has the Over-Provisioning setting.

You might achieve more capacity by removing the over-provisioned area
but at the sacrifice of speed and endurance.

I'm not sure what you are talking about with "manual" trim. With the
prior Magician, I was simply told that trim was on; I was given no
options to control that feature.

For TRIM to work:

- The OS must support TRIM to SSDs (which also means the drives must
recognized as SSDs). Windows XP, and prior, do not support TRIM.
- There must be sufficient idle time during which the OS can issue the
TRIM command as a background operation. This prevents impacting the
responsiveness of the device. Erasing interrupts writing.
- The driver (to interface between OS and hardware) must support TRIM.
Some old drivers do not.
- The drive controller must support a sufficient subset of the SATA
protocol to include support of TRIM. Some old SATA controllers don't.
- The SSD must support TRIM. Some ancient ones did not.

Only if ALL those conditions are met is TRIM available. Only takes one
condition to fail for TRIM to fail.

Running "fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify" in a command shell
to see if the value is 1 (TRIM enabled) or 0 (TRIM disabled) only tells
you if the first requirement above is satisfied (that the OS supports
TRIM). The rest you won't know until you notice or benchmark your SSD
when new and later when perceived to be slow to know TRIM isn't working.

On Sun, 25 Jun 2017 14:29:12 -0600, Jeff Barnett wrote:

Does anyone of you know 1) what is going on with the Samsung Magician,
2) does Version 5.0.0 still use disk for over-partitioning, or 3) if
not, how to reclaim and use the now wasted space?

V5 doesn't use over provisioning and you can see any free space
previously used in storage manager. I used Paragon Hard Disk Manager to
extend my partition to use the space previously reserved for
over-partitioning but any other tools should be able to do it.

Thanks for the info. Any reason you didn't just use the Windows "Disk
Management" interface to reclaim the space?

Familiarity with Paragon and a recovery partition between the C drive
and the free space so the recovery partition had to be moved up.

--
Faster, cheaper, quieter than HS2
and built in 5 years;
UKUltraspeed http://www.500kmh.com/

VanguardLH wrote on 6/25/2017 3:32 PM:

My recommendation is you go back to version 4.96 of Samsung Magician.
Not only does the old version have a manual TRIM function (called
Performance Optimization) but also has the Over-Provisioning setting.

I tried to find a place to download Magician 4.9.6 and ran into
difficulties: Samsung had a pointer to download it that didn't work and
I tried another place that fired off my AV and Malware software, etc. Do
you happen to know a safe place to download 4.9.6 or any other late
minor version of version 4?
--
Jeff Barnett

On Sun, 25 Jun 2017 22:08:51 -0600, Jeff Barnett wrote:

VanguardLH wrote on 6/25/2017 3:32 PM:

My recommendation is you go back to version 4.96 of Samsung Magician.
Not only does the old version have a manual TRIM function (called
Performance Optimization) but also has the Over-Provisioning setting.

I tried to find a place to download Magician 4.9.6 and ran into
difficulties: Samsung had a pointer to download it that didn't work and
I tried another place that fired off my AV and Malware software, etc. Do
you happen to know a safe place to download 4.9.6 or any other late
minor version of version 4?

I was about to ask the same question - the number of hits is very low and
most range from irrelevant to (looking) dangerous.

I've just run "fsutil..." and it returns "0", so the foray with v5.1 has
borked something - is there any way in W7 to change this without Magician?

On my CD it's v4.5.1.
--
Peter.
The gods will stay away
whilst religions hold sway

On Sun, 25 Jun 2017 16:32:34 -0500, VanguardLH wrote:

Running "fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify" in a command shell
to see if the value is 1 (TRIM enabled) or 0 (TRIM disabled) only tells
you if the first requirement above is satisfied (that the OS supports
TRIM). The rest you won't know until you notice or benchmark your SSD
when new and later when perceived to be slow to know TRIM isn't working.

Yipes! Ran SM v4.5.1 to set it for Max. Reliability (then changed some power
settings a bit), re-checked TRIM and still got 0.
Did a search and found that 0 indicates that TRIM is enabled (5 sites - 1
site said the opposite!).

Bloody Magician is a PITA. It tells me that it can't continue, probably
because it's looking for updates and it blocked by the firewall, then start
automatically but nowhere can I find that and Win Patrol didn't even wimper.
--
Peter.
The gods will stay away
whilst religions hold sway

On 06/25/2017 10:38 AM, Jeff Barnett wrote:
I'm using 256GB Samsung SSD 840 Pro as C disks on my Win 7 Pro SP1
64-bit machines. Samsung Magician software has been loaded on all of
them. I recently updated Magician on one machine from Version 4.x.y to
Version 5.0.0. The GUI interface is totally different.

The most important difference, to me, is that there is no mention or
control of "over-partitioning" in the GUI or any discussion in the
documentation I could find. My C disk dedicated the default 10% (about
24GB) to this task. That dedication was set up while running Version
4.x.y. My question is whether I can take that 24GB and merge it with the
usable part of my C disk now that I'm using Version 5.0.0?

I searched for information and some opinions were that Samsung no longer
believes that over-partitioning is necessary (in Win 10?) but I could
find no Samsung statement to that effect nor any described method to
safely reclaim that previously dedicate chunk of the SSD. Samsung phone
support is mostly useless - ask the same question twice and get at least
two different answers.

Does anyone of you know 1) what is going on with the Samsung Magician,
2) does Version 5.0.0 still use disk for over-partitioning, or 3) if
not, how to reclaim and use the now wasted space?

TIA

Hi Jeff,

Samsung's tech support is extraordinary. Here is my
contact info on them:

Samsung Tech Support

800-726-7864

hours of operation:
m-f: 6:00 - 21:00 pst;
sat: 6-18:00 pst

HTH,
-T

Jeff Barnett wrote:

VanguardLH wrote on 6/25/2017 3:32 PM:

My recommendation is you go back to version 4.96 of Samsung Magician.
Not only does the old version have a manual TRIM function (called
Performance Optimization) but also has the Over-Provisioning setting.

I tried to find a place to download Magician 4.9.6 and ran into
difficulties: Samsung had a pointer to download it that didn't work and
I tried another place that fired off my AV and Malware software, etc. Do
you happen to know a safe place to download 4.9.6 or any other late
minor version of version 4?

What about the CD that came with the SSD? That's likely where I got the
old version although I also have a Downloads folder (under which there
are Hardware and Software subfolders, and subfolders under each for
category, and so one until down to a subfolder for the vendor or
product). So I'm not sure where I found the 4.96 version of Magician
but the CD should have an old version.

VanguardLH wrote:

Jeff Barnett wrote:

VanguardLH wrote on 6/25/2017 3:32 PM:

My recommendation is you go back to version 4.96 of Samsung Magician.
Not only does the old version have a manual TRIM function (called
Performance Optimization) but also has the Over-Provisioning setting.

I tried to find a place to download Magician 4.9.6 and ran into
difficulties: Samsung had a pointer to download it that didn't work and
I tried another place that fired off my AV and Malware software, etc. Do
you happen to know a safe place to download 4.9.6 or any other late
minor version of version 4?

What about the CD that came with the SSD? That's likely where I got the
old version although I also have a Downloads folder (under which there
are Hardware and Software subfolders, and subfolders under each for
category, and so one until down to a subfolder for the vendor or
product). So I'm not sure where I found the 4.96 version of Magician
but the CD should have an old version.

Sometimes you can find still-active download links by finding copies of
old web pages at the Web Archive (web.archive.org). I went there and
entered Samsung's current download page at:

http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor...oad/tools.html

Alas, their Javascript does not work for the archived web page. On
hovering over the download link at Samsung's download page, I was hoping
a version number would be included in the URL or filename. Then I would
try changing 5.1[whatever] to 4.96. Alas, Samsung does not include a
version number in the URL or filename.


I suppose you could contact Samsung's support to ask for a copy of their
4.96 version of Magician.

I could upload the file to a public online server but would you really
trust some joker from Usenet? I found a web site with the 4.97 download
(4.96 was the last that I got from Samsung so I don't know if there was
an office 4.97 release); however, you would have to trust some unknown
web site's download. It's a French site so perhaps that Magician copy
is a French language version. They're at:

https://www.touslesdrivers.com/php/c...p?v_code=49390

Oooh, here's another place (it has downloads for 5.1, 5.0, and 4.96):

http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/...ician-4-5.html