[Rant] Samsung 840 Pro finally supports Rapid Mode but no love for 840 non-pro

When Samsung released the 840 EVO, it introduced this new feature called Rapid mode where the SSD could use a portion of RAM as a super fast cache for the SSD to speed up reads and writes. At that time, only the 840 EVO family of SSDs supported this feature. There were rumors that this feature would eventually come to the other two models of the 840 family, the 840 Pro and the 840 non-Pro.

Yesterday Samsung updated their Samsung Magician software to bring Rapid mode to the 840 Pro family of SSDs. All you have to do is install Samsung Magician version 4.3. If you already have an older version installed, you will be prompted to update when you launch it.

It is nice that Rapid Mode doesn’t need a firmware update.

But that makes me wonder, why isn’t the 840 non-pro supported? If it can be done by just updating their Magician software, they could bring this feature to the 840 non-pro models without any problems, right? Does that mean these drives are never going to get the Rapid Mode? That would really suck!

Samsung 840 series 250GB Firmware Update: DXT08B0Q Benchmarks

Samsung released a new firmware for the Samsung 840 series (Pro and non-Pro both) few days ago. I didn’t upgrade that instant, because I saw on OCN forums that few people were having issues with the new firmware. I don’t want to end up with a dead drive. I don’t have a spare SSD lying around. Wish I kept that old SSD with me just in case something went wrong with the new one. But I didn’t and there is no point regretting about it. Have to move on.

But today I gave in, and went ahead with the update. What made me confident that something bad might not happen is because Samsung hadn’t pulled the firmware. That means there is nothing wrong with it to begin with. The people who got bad outcomes must have done something stupid. Just to be safe, I killed all the apps running in the foreground as well as background before starting the firmware update process.

I had DXT07B0Q firmware before update. You have to use Samsung SSD Magician software to do the firmware update. Even without me checking for an update manually, it automatically detected that there was a newer firmware available and highlighted in the UI of the software. Nothing amazing. That’s the way everything should work these days anyways. Just wanted to say that it is working as if should.

Everything went smooth. It didn’t take long, and once done, the software told me that it needs to shutdown the PC to finish the update. What I didn’t know was that it would not automatically reboot. It was a clean shutdown, not a reboot. Some people might be confused by how it happened. With the previous drive, all that was required was a reboot. Anyways, now I know how it works in the future.

So did I see any gains with the new firmware? No! None at all. I recorded some benchmark scores on AS-SSD before and after the firmware update. Before running the test, I optimized the drive using the Magician software. Here are the results.

Note: Both tests were run with Intel Rapid Storage Technology ver. 11.7.0.1013 drivers.

Before update ( ver. DXT07B0Q )

After update ( ver. DXT08B0Q )

As you can see, the scores are identical. The difference would be attributed to measurement error. Well, at least the performance didn’t go down. That’s a relief.

Samsung 840 series 250GB SSD–after couple of months

So I’ve been happily using my new SSD without any hiccups….wait! There was one hiccup where the Windows Experience Index score dropped from 8.1 to 7.9. That sucked, because that was what I was getting with my old Kingston HyperX 120GB SSD too. I was expecting this SSD to perform faster throughout the entire lifespan. Dropping to the same grounds obviously made me feel very sad.

But luckily, I was able to get back the lost performance by running the Performance Optimization function of Samsung Magician software. I don’t know exactly what it does, but it should not be something extensive because whatever it did finished within few seconds.

According to the health monitor, I have written 0.8TB of data to this drive. That’s a little of 11GB per day. That’s a lot, right? Maybe I should stop using the fast start functionality of Windows 8 which saves the kernel to the hiberfile.sys when you turn the PC off. That means, you don’t have to reload everything from the scratch. That would save like 1-2 seconds of Windows boot time – no big deal – the SSD is more important, right?

Drive health status in Samsung Magician software

Wait. I’m getting ahead of myself. So, 11GB per day means, it takes about 14 days to completely fill the “remaining” cells (the actual capacity of 256GB – 100GB used = 156GB remaining / 11GB per day). Two weeks. TLC flash on this drive can be rewritten up to 3000 times. At the current state, the drive should be able to live for 3000 of two weeks, meaning more than 100 years!!!

OK, I’m gonna keep Fast Start enabled because time matters…even those couple of seconds which you won’t even notice because the PC would be already booted up by the time you come back to the PC.

S.M.A.R.T information

I have no idea how to read these values, but since everything is OK, I’d not worry about it any further.