Samsung SSd Magician sowtware questions

XRWKEN

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Just finished install my Samsung 830 256g ssd. only took 8 hours, Yippee well almost done still dl'ing BF3

The magician software I installed has a firmware updater, It doesn't tell me if i need a update, just says to make a backup or you will loose all your info. Since windows backup/restore is turned off per what everyone says, How would I make a backup of my complete ssd. I also read in this forum the the included Norton ghost doesn't work and f's everything up, so I didn't install it.

How will I know If i need a firmware update?


The OS optimization section wants me to do just about everything for me that others have told me I need to do manually, IE, turn off defrag, disable super etc. Why dont people say to use this? also in my system service ready boost is grayed out and the tuned column for it just has a dash through it, all the other items have a Y in the column.

I did a performance benchmark, seemed slower then I thought others have said:
Seq. read=just under 300mb
Seq. write= about 250mb
Random read=just over 45000 iops
Random write= just under 30000 iops

Is this slower then normal?

In my bios I set my sata as AHCI before i installed windows, when doing that it sets All sata ports to AHCI, Is this normal? now my second HD and my CD rom that are connected to my sata2 and sata 3 are set as AHCI. I cannot set each sata port individually

Other then windows booting up faster I dont really see a speed increase over my old WD HD, If anything it seems like my thumb drive and CD Rom is now lots slower reading then before. Anything to do with them now being set a AHCI in the bios?

Hopefully someone can shed some light on my questions,
Thanks
Hitch
 
Solution
Since you have an X58 MB, and are on the intel sata II port, the best driver is Intel's iaSTor (slightly better than MS default msahci driver. Latest intel RST driver (just google it), I believe is 10.8.

Sata II port will limit the performance for the SATA III Samsung. The "good news" is that the biggest hit is on the Sequencial read / writes, which are the least important parameter for an OS and Program drive.

An SSD ONLY speeds up loading the OS and loading programs, WILL not speed up programs or increase gaming performance (ie FPS). It will improve loading maps during game play, but only if they are also on the SSD.

I generally run AS SSD to verify Firmware version, driver used, and partition alignment. Opening the AS SSD will...

eXistenZ

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Couple questions. When you say sata2 and sata3, do you mean port number 2 and number 3? Which would mean that the SSD is connected to port number 1. I think port might be the correct term. And does the motherboard have SATA III capability? If you only have SATA II, that might explain things.

So, what hardware do you have? OS is Win 7?

Backup and Restore found in Control Panel in W7.

Yea, I think AHCI sets everything to that, does on mine, need hardware and software questions answered.

Firmware update? In Magician, it offers "Firmware Update" option. Click that. Now that you have everything running, back it all up, right. So click that option.

 
Since you have an X58 MB, and are on the intel sata II port, the best driver is Intel's iaSTor (slightly better than MS default msahci driver. Latest intel RST driver (just google it), I believe is 10.8.

Sata II port will limit the performance for the SATA III Samsung. The "good news" is that the biggest hit is on the Sequencial read / writes, which are the least important parameter for an OS and Program drive.

An SSD ONLY speeds up loading the OS and loading programs, WILL not speed up programs or increase gaming performance (ie FPS). It will improve loading maps during game play, but only if they are also on the SSD.

I generally run AS SSD to verify Firmware version, driver used, and partition alignment. Opening the AS SSD will display that info in the upper left without running the bench mark. I also prefer that benchmark as it uses compressed data which is closer to real live than Benchmark programs that use data that is highly compressable (such as ATTO). One cavet: Seq Scores are Lower, Primarily for SF22xx controller based SSDs and Manuf Love ATTO because of it's inflated Sequencial readings.

No you can not set individual ports seperatly.

The SSD and using AHCI should not affect USB performance not DVD performance. I have not noticed any change on any of my 4 different systems that have SSDs installed.
 
Solution

aicom

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What exact tweaks have you done? If you don't know exactly what you're doing, you can degrade your performance with them. I generally recommend only the tweaks that Windows 7 does by default. Defragmentation (for the SSD ONLY, not other disks) should be off, but Windows 7 does that automatically. Windows 8's "defragmenter" will TRIM SSDs which is pretty cool. I'd recommend the RST driver also, but again you're going to be limited by SATA II.
 
If the Samsung Software Magician does not show a firmware update, then you are up to date.

I did not turn of my Windows Backup feature. Instead, I changed the backup location from my ssd to my hard disk drive. It is one of the space saving tweaks.

The Samsung SSD Magician is exclusive to Samsung. Owners of other brands probably don't know about it or its features. Very very few brands have a similar utility.

Retired Chief answered the rest of your questions.
 

sajid89

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ptimization section wants me to do just about everything for me that others have told me I need to do manually, IE, turn off defrag, disable super etc. Why dont people say to use this? also in my system service ready boost is grayed out and the tuned column for it just has a dash through it, all the other items have a Y in the column.
 

XRWKEN

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I did everything in this tweak guide
-http://www.computing.net/howtos/show/solid-state-drive-ssd-tweaks-for-windows-7/552.html

 

XRWKEN

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List of what they say to do:
Set to AHCI Mode:
Verify TRIM is Enabled
Disable System Restore
Disable Drive Indexing
Disable Drive Defragmentation Schedule
Disable PageFile
Disable Hibernation
Disable Prefetch and Superfetch
Disable Windows Write-Cache Buffer Flusing
Disable Windows Search and Superfetch
Disable ClearPageFileAtShutdown and LargeSystemCache
Adjust the Power Settings