Samsung Magician Software does not work with XP

Important Drivers General: Storage Drivers (AHCI/RAID, NVMe and USB)
1

Hello

I am in the process of installing Windows XP SP3 on a Samsung 840 Pro 128Gb SSD. The software that Samsung provides Magician Software v4.21 to manage the health and performance doesn’t work on it. It does not recognize his own drive, its firmware and serial number. Only the test performs.

I also have installed Windows 7 Professional on the same computer and it works great without a problem.

The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-F2A85X-UP4 with a AMD APU A10-5800K processor.

For XP I tried with the drivers by default (those that come with the operating system) and also with the last ones provided by AMD (FM2-FM1 Chipset Driver v9.0.100.1000) It is the AMD SATA RAID v3.3.1540.33

For 7 only with those that come with the operating system (without SP1)

I have asked Samsung and they are no help at all. Anybody knows what is happening?
Many thanks

2

@ enesalpa:
Welcome at Win-RAID Forum and thanks for your contribution!

Have you connected the Samsung SSD to the first of the available AMD SATA ports?
If yes, I doubt, that anyone except Samsung is able to solve your Samsung Magician problem.

By the way: TRIM is not working while running Windows XP. Why is it so importatn for you to be able to run the Samsung tool Magician with both Operating Systems? Maybe you are overestimating the benefit of the tool.

Regards
Fernando

3

@enesalpa :

Maybe you’re running in IDE emulation mode (since you say you’ve tried vanilla XP drivers)? I think AHCI is needed. But apart from that, two more things to consider:

Here it says Magician has issues with AMD hardware. I don’t know which generation is your board/processor, but it’s puzzling that it works for you on Windows 7. I listed this site only as an example, I remember reading something more about problems with AMD, but I can’t find where…

Magician relies on WMI subsystem and won’t even install if it isn’t enabled. That’s why I gave up on even trying it on XP (I have disabled WMI on purpose there). Check everything WMI on your XP - not only the service, but other things… To troubleshoot, download WMIDiag.vbs from Microsoft (current version 2.1 is for 7, try finding 2.0 for XP).

@Fernando :

I guess he wants to run Magician on XP in order to “perform” trim - although I have doubts whether its Optimizer tool performs real trim on any OS - here, on win7, after running Magician’s optimizer, the statistics in the registry for microsoft’s defrag tool is updated - does it only run microsoft defrag? (which, as we know, performs trim on Windows8, but not on previous OSes).

GL

4



Hi Fernando

Yes the Samsung is connected to the 0 SATA port, and I know that TRIM only works on Windows 7 and 8 only. How you said: I am overestimating the benfit of the tool.
Thanks

5



Hi

I am running in AHCI mode. The motherboard is the last generation of Gigabyte boards for APU.

I wanted to use Magician Software because it come with the Samsung 840 Pro SSD, and I know that TRIM runs only on Windows 7 and 8.

What tool can I use to replace Magcian Software and help Windows XP not to degrade the SSD?

Thanks

6



Hi,
I wouldn’t be too concerned with trim on XP with this drive - in the reviews it is said to have pretty good garbage collection. I use it personally in dual boot and don’t use anything on XP, but I find myself spending less and less time in XP. I just try to avoid deleting big files from XP. I think that, even if this drive was to be used only in XP, it would show no visible degradation.

Otherwise, there are "manual trim" tools from other manufacturers that maybe will work with Samsung too. Their principle of operation is that they fill the drive (partition really) with random data (or 0’s or 1’s) and let the drive’s garbage collection take over. They create one big file until the partition is filled. I have used them in the past and after their usage an improvement in benchmarks can be seen, but now I wouldn’t recommend any such tool, especially with this drive, because it works quite well without them, and they also increase the write cycles of the SSD, which are a limited resouce, for no tangible benefit in real life except for benchmarks. And, as I said, I’m not convinced that even Magician performs real trim (or manual garbage collection) on any OS below Windows 8.

But if you want to try the tools, here are two examples: From Crucial and from Patriot. I used each only on SSDs from that manufacturer, so no guarantee they will work on Samsung.

But, to repeat myself, I would use XP on this SSD without any tool. The performance is amazing and will not suffer (much).

GL

7

@ enesalpa:

I agree with GrofLuigi. If you want TRIM support, you should not run Windows XP.

8

a couple of issues:

first (taken from Magician manual) "The Performance Optimization feature relies on the ATA PASS THROUGH feature to pass the TRIM command to the SSD. This feature may be disabled by Windows XP/2003 if your SSD is less than 137GB in size.
Microsoft provides a hot fix for this issue at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934205. Performance Optimization supports only the NTFS file system."

second, as previously stated, AMD drivers seems not compatible with Magician, only Microsoft and Nvidia drivers are.

9

Many thanks for all the advices. I will see ad check how the Samsung behaves with the XP.

10

hi Enesalpa,
as you can see Integration of Intels AHCI/RAID drivers into a Windows XP CD
I managed to get Magician to work properly on XP Home with an Intel based machine. TRIM is working and all is fine.