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What does "Performance Optimization" in Samsung's Magician do? Followup question.

jhansman

jhansman

Platinum Member
I run this util about monthly, but I'm damned if I can see any before and after difference. What's it for and how does it do it? Also, does Crucial or any other maker offer such a util?
 
I assume the drive does GC during idle, but this is the first SSD I've had (of three now) that offers such utils, so I was hoping someone would know. Anyone? Bueller?
 
What I find really puzzling about the Magician is that it runs periodically and sets a bunch system wakeup timers. It took me a while to figure it out. My Thinkpad would come out from sleep by itself, very shortly after putting it to sleep. Eventually I found a command to list outstanding timers, which took me to the magician being the culprit.
I am not sure what it is trying to do. One would think that since the 830 TRIM support is OS independent, it could not be based on the Magician which only runs in Windows.

Since I found the timers, I stop the Magician manually if I want to sleep to system.
 
I suppose we could find out from Samsung support, but I thought I'd come here first. Interesting that none of us is exactly sure what it's doing. BTW, like most utils, the Magician wanted to autorun at startup, and after installing it, I immediately edited my startup list in Msconfig to prevent it from doing so. I only let it do its thing when I choose.
 
It's a way of forcing TRIM and GC to run. It's primary target are XP systems who regardless of storage driver do not get TRIM support. Although it works the same way under Windows 7, it's largely redundant.

Intel's SSD toolbox has a similar feature. Intel's feature just runs TRIM, which it why it takes 1-2 seconds to run. The drive will still recycle the blocks when it feels like. Samsung's approach is to perform TRIM and a full block recycle and arrange (GC) during this process which is why it takes 3 minutes (at least on my 128GB).
 
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Samsung (and Intel) offer very good utilities that set up Windows properly (especially useful if you've cloned rather than fresh installed). Don't know if that's what this is referring to or not.

Sandisk offers a (basically useless) utility that is supposed to do checkups and maintenance.

I've never seen any similar utilities for my Plextor or Mushkin drives.
 
It's a way of forcing TRIM and GC to run. It's primary target are XP systems that regardless of storage driver do not have TRIM support. Although it works the same way under Windows 7, it's largely redundant.

Intel's SSD toolbox has a similar feature. Intel's feature just runs TRIM, which it why it takes 1-2 seconds to run. The drive will still recycle the blocks when it feels like. Samsung's approach is to perform TRIM and a full block recycle and arrange (GC) during this process which is why it takes 3 minutes (at least on my 128GB).
 
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