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Thursday, August 22, 2013

[Article] Samsung Magician 4.2 still doesn’t support Rapid Mode on 840 Standard or Pro SSDs

Samsung released their new SSD, namely the 840 EVO, which sits between the 840 standard (the one I have) and the 840 Pro models that they released about a year ago. (Woah! It’s been that long?) They brought few cool stuff with the EVO, namely the TurboWrite and RAPID Mode. Plus, now you can get a 1TB drive for about $600, which was actually the price of a 80GB Intel x25-M SSD 3-4 years back. (To be honest, unless you are going insane and giving up on hard drives, 1TB drives are overkill. Sweet spot these days is at 240-256GB range.)

TurboWrite is where the SSD can use a portion of its flash memory as SLC (single level cell) which gives much faster performance, especially when it comes to writes. With the rest of the flash memory arranged as TLC (not even MLC), it can reach average write speeds close the 840 Pro which uses MLC across the board. The 840 standard uses TLC which is also the first consumer TLC based SSD. TurboWrite is built into the controller.

imagesRAPID Mode (which is strangely an abbreviation for Real-time Accelerated Processing of I/O Data) on the other hand is a software implementation. What it does is that it can use the system memory as a cache to boost the performance of the already fast SSD. It’s is kind of like Asus’s RAIDR SSD which was released few week ago. Samsung didn’t make this caching part from the ground up. They bought a company that specialized in caching software, called Nvelo. They made the software for it. RAPID mode is activated from Samsung’s SSD Management software called Samsung Magician.

Now, this RAPID mode is introduced in Samsung Magician software version 4.2 onwards. Couple of days ago, they released it to the public. Until then, it came bundled with the EVO drive. What I was really looking forward to see is RAPID mode working for older 840 SSDs. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. It says my 840 standard edition SSD is not supported. (You can download Samsung Magician 4.2.1 from this link)

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There were rumors that they will eventually be supported. And I hope those rumors will become a reality. I have 16GB RAM in my PC and I hardly use more than 8GB RAM, even without paging enable. I need more I/O speed.

3 comments:

  1. there are 2 programs that do the same and get better perfomance.

    http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/6316/pcrc.png

    ReplyDelete
  2. yeah forgot to mention, they failed to bundle the 4.2 with the evos, i had to track down a leak

    ReplyDelete
  3. Also, Rapid mode fails to enable on Windows Server 2012 R2 (64-bit). Sucks really hard since I've god 24G of memory. :: upset as hell ::

    ReplyDelete

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