Windows 10: Samsung Magician

Very nice benchmarks and real world speeds. Upgrading to Samsung EVO 850's in RAID 0 would be neglectable both in real world and benchmarks speeds compared to what you've got already (2x Samsung EVO 840's in RAID 0), better to wait for full a upgrade to SATA Express SSD's in a year or two.

 

You're welcome Jim. You might want to make sure you have Version 4.6 of Magician too.

 

Hmmm, after a day with RAPID off, I've noticed my desktop to be faster and more responsive than with it on!!?? Boot time has dropped a couple of seconds(to be expected), and my system image backup with Macrium actually dropped 30 seconds to 3:15 minutes from 3:45(unexpected). yes I know the writes on the 2nd internal HDD are not influenced, but the reads on the SSD are. After turning RAPID off, I made sure PreFetch/SuperFetch was back on and because of the upgrade soon I also turned Write cache buffer flushing back on, even though I have a back-up power supply(just until the upgrade is through). In another words, I've set my system back to safe stable reliability and not benchmarks/performance, and it is running better than before.

 

With Windows 10 and Samsung magician version 4.6, I was unable to invoke rapid mode on my 850 Pro. However, uninstalling 4.6 and installing 4.4 worked like a charm. Not only did 4.4 (unlike the indication in some earlier posts) see both my 850 Pro and 840 Evo, but I was able to invoke rapid on the 850 Pro. I was never too sure about the real-world benefits of rapid, however the difference was clearly noticeable. For whatever that is worth.

 

Check here same thing How to enable Rapid mode on Samsun 850 Pro

 

Yeah it's just a gimmick IMO I used it for a little while when I first purchased my SSD's but quickly noticed no difference with it on other than benchmarks.

 

Check out a later review of the 850 Pro and the impact of rapid from the same quoted source. Fairly different story.Samsung's 850 Pro solid-state drive reviewed - The Tech Report - Page 1

 

Don't know which review your talking about but I can only speak for my experience with 840 EVO's and 16GB RAM.

 

Ive been using it quite a while and besides that i causes VARIOUS problems with some games (blackscreen after starting a game , or flipping you back to the desktop and repeteadly doing so if you want to task back into the game)
it also was the cause for the windows 8.1 ---> windows 10 upgrade process to fail (you had to find that our by yourself by trial and error). The software is mainly junk honestly. And the benchmark results for rapid mode are super artificial.
In everyday use i have no difference whatever in performance without drive magician. (840 EVO , 16 gb ram)

 

Either way it's still a benchmark, only way to know for sure is in "Real" world usage and not something that an application does.

 

Different strokes/perceptions for different folks. In Windows 10, after enabling rapid on my 850 Pro I found a noticeable difference in responsiveness. This could be wishful thinking, but enabling and disabling this feature reinforced this difference for me. The attached URL in my prior post is a substantial reversal by techreport.com on the earlier quoted article where they found minimal differences when rapid was enabled/disabled. It is possible that the shift from using 1 GB of RAM (by rapid when the first article was written) and 4 GB of RAM from the second article was written could be responsible for the improved performance measures. Synthetic tests aside, rapid seems to work for me.

 

The realy strange but stupid thins it only fails in checking windows version is over 7

 

I just got the 850 EVO.. yippee. I installed it and using Data Migration software, replaced my C drive (840 EVO) with my new 850 *Smile

When I launched Magician I did all the setup and tried to enable RAPID... whoops, says only one drive.. fine I disabled the 840 so I could switch it to 850... nope... nothing doing. Would not enable. I came to this site and see a workaround for the 850 PRO... doesn't work on the 850 EVO... bummer. So I figure, how slow can it be without RAPID... it's still gotta be screaming fast right?
See this chart below... I'm crying now. Please Samsung guys... fix your Magician Software so I can get what I thought I was paying for!

 

@MrStan,
I can tell you now after a few months of being without it, in day to day use I don't see a difference, when I let Windows take care of everything after running winsat formal in an admin command prompt.

But for boot times, I see a huge difference. There is no way to speed up BIOS to CMOS that I know of, so this stays the same, but, after it's finishe I see the dots(starting circle) just appear, then boom desktop. It's almost instantaneous.(using Fast Startup and Quick Boot). That's my old Windows 8.1 desktop. On my old Windows 7 laptop, it takes 1-2 seconds longer.

So my verdict, I really don't need it, as I don't run benchmarks any more(toooo many writes) and I get faster boot times with out it, and in day to day use I see absolutely no difference.

 

@MrStan

I'd recommend to turn RAPID off even when it can be enabled (in fact that is what I am doing). If you ask me, the advertised performance gains are nothing short of a scam (or at least very misleading advertising) and can only be seen in certain benchmarks.

In real life the performance gains are non-existent, and in fact RAPID may even slow things down in real life. It certainly does slow down bootup a little. Plus that extra caching to volatile memory without Windows controlling it does increase the risk of data loss or corruption eg. in case of sudden power loss.

See:
A closer look at RAPID DRAM caching on the Samsung 840 EVO SSD - The Tech Report - Page 8
sure, that is last generations 840 EVO, but not much has changed in real world performance after it:
Samsung's 850 Pro solid-state drive reviewed - The Tech Report - Page 6

The reason RAPID appear to be so fast is that it fools some benchmarks into thinking it has finished the task, when in fact it has only copied the data to RAM and is still working on the "write to disk" part. Windows is fully capable of RAM caching to the extend that is actually beneficial.