Fail: Samsung Magician, Windows and old SSDs …

[German]Hot topic – Samsung SSDs and the tool provided by the manufacturer Samsung Magician. As it looks, users are running into the problem that older SSDs are no longer supported by the Samsung Magician.


Advertising

I'll bring up the topic here on the blog, maybe blog readers can add to the experience. As it looks, the current Samsung Magician is not able to support older SSDs anymore.

I became aware of the issue being discussed at askwoody.com through the above tweet from Michael Horowitz. A user of Windows 10 version 1909 has a Samsung PM830 128GB SSD installed and asked how he could find out the 'health status' of this SSD.

Hello to All!

I am hoping to get some advice on a bit of a conundrum I am experiencing with the health of my SSD.

I check my SSD roughly monthly with CrystalDiskInfo and upto & including version 8.5.0 x64 showed my drive's health status as: Good – 94%.

A recent update of CrytsalDiskInfo to version 8.7.0 x64 and it now shows as: Good – 59%.

Based on such a percentage change, I explored a bit further using Open Hardware Monitor (0.9.5) and this shows a 'remaining life' of 94%.

I checked again today using both versions of CrystalDiskInfo and each comes up with a different percentage?!  I also used the CMD: wmic diskdrive get model,status which only shows a status of OK.

Can anyone shed any light on this issue as any advice would be greatly appreciated – thank you.

A well-meaning user then suggested using the Samsung Magician for this test. The tool is provided by Samsung ja for managing SSDs. However, to my surprise, the Samsung Magician may fail with older SSDs. The user wrote about this:

Apologies, but I should have mentioned trying Samsung Magician but ridiculously, it returned no information about the drive!  Technically though, my drive is not listed as supported – certainly not on the current version 6.

He probably has the Samsung Magician in version 6 and there his Samsung SSD is not recognized anymore. Here it says then:


Advertising

In summary; the SSD is quite old and no longer supported by Samsung – certainly with regards to their Samsung Magician software.

Then I searched on the Internet. This Samsung forum post is already about this for the 5.x version of the Samsung Magician. 

Samsung Magician Drive not supported
(Source: Samsung)

There it helped to put the SSD on another controller to address it via Samsung Magician. Often it is the controller driver that causes the problems (see here). And here omeone has brought his SSD back to the point where it was detected by trying out certain software versions. Appuals has published a guide on what to do if the SSD is not recognized.  eine Handlungsanleitung veröffentlicht, was man tun kann, falls die SSD nicht erkannt wird.

It seems to be non reliable, and Windows as a service makes things even more complicated, when there is a feature update every 6 months, which may need a new version of the Samsung Magician. What are your experiences in this respect? Is all this not a problem, or is it stuck in every corner?

Similar article:
Windows 10 2004: Bug defragments SSDs too often
HPE warns again about possible SSD failures (March 2020)
HPE warns of SSD storage systems failure coming soon
Bugs in Western Digital SSD Utility puts users at risk
Bitlocker on SSDs: Microsoft Security Advisory Notification (Nov. 6, 2018)
SSD vulnerability breaks (Bitlocker) encryption
Windows 10 V1803: Update KB4100403 (with SSD fix)


Cookies helps to fund this blog: Cookie settings
Advertising


##1

This entry was posted in issue, Windows and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *