Got a Samsung SSD?

You need a magician:
http://www.samsung.com/gl...support/downloads.html

Nope not vapourware or bloat.

fireberd
I have two Samsung SSD's, an 840 EVO 500GB for Windows 7 and an 850 EVO 500GB for Windows 10.  I don't use the Magician.  I tried it, for cloning when I got the 840 and was replacing a hard drive and the clone did not work.  I don't need any of the tweaking it does, in fact it screwed up my Power configuration and some tweaks I had done (on Win 7).  My systems boot up fast and no need for any tweaking there.

 
Sounds like you used an old version. Magician does not do hard drive cloning as far as I'm aware.
 
The latest version allows you to review the settings before you change them, if you don't do this of course your preferred settings may screw up :) The latest version seems pretty good.
 
I used their recommendation minus one thing myself for optimization.
 
The main reason to use it imho is firmware upgrades.
 
Cheers...

If you check the link the data migration software is an entirely different product. I wouldn't use a Samsung product for this anyway. It is Win10 compatible and I can confirm it works (Evo 850).

I see them talking about "rapid mode." What's that all about? I mean, are these things not fast enough as they stand?

850 EVO has a 5 year warranty.

I recall seeing some 7,200 rpm (non-SSD) drives changing from a 5-year warranty, to a 3-year or even 2-year warranty.
 
Just check it out, as it varies from maker to maker, as well as between models for the same maker.  :)
 
Bob Bone
 

JonD
I'm about to buy my first SSD's (500GB).  I take it the Samsungs are the way to go?  Any particular model?

I'd say go with the Pro, and not the Evo.
 
Don't ask why, I do not have any idea why I said that...

My view is after 5 years you will be wanting to replace them anyway, these drives will seem slow or there will be another technology that will replace it all. 5 years is a long time. There is a price difference between EVO and PRO. Anyway there is a choice..

Pro seria has almost liner price here, in Germany. From ~150 for 256GB (0.6 pro GB) up to ~1000 for 2TB (0.5 pro GB). So  2x 256 are a bit more expensive then 1x 512. In terms of performance, I can not imagine an audio recording/processing scenario when 2x Pro SSD give visible performance boost. Conventional disks are extremely slow in accessing data in parallel (they have to mechanically move head), SSDs have no such problem.
 
Evo seria has limited fast speed buffer, so when you access big data (>10TB) in parallel, it is theoretically possible to see performance improvement.
 
Warranty for SSDs (as well as for other parts) should be taken with care. Manufacturers just count expected returns. If 1% of users will return disks every year (just because 99% "underuse" them, and so "programmed" returns), it can still be ok write "5 years" to sell more (or more expensive). At the same time, if you expect most of particular model consumers are going to be "heavy users" (probable with Pro), you are not going to write 10years are replace 50% of them every year...
 
Evo vs Pro is the price vs safety. It is up to personal preference and use case. Some people build 24/7 heavy duty RAIDs from cheap HDDs and then replace them every week/month, other fill "one doc file per day" RAIDs with really expensive disks. Hard disks are not cars, no one look at them. So it make sense to choose the solution for your real needs

robert_e_bone
And as far as performance goes, it depends on how you would split things across 2 SSD's.  If had a single SSD that held my Sonar projects as well as my sample libraries, it would not perform as well as splitting those two sets of folders across 2 SSD's.

This is an interesting topic..

It is certainly true with hard drives when magnetic heads are moving around trying to find data, another hard drive can be pumping out the data, and hard drives are slow. It definitely makes sense to have multiple hard drives for performance.

But from what I understand SSDs are getting faster than SATA itself. So I'm not sure the old rule applies anymore. Or if it does it won't apply for much longer. Has anybody researched this further?

Also note you can partition a single SSD of course into multiple drive partitions but that won't improve performance, it just will keep things structured that's all.

Yup did some further research - if you put them in RAID 0, and then (optionally) partition them, you should see a big boost in performance.

Right, the performance benefits aren't as big in terms of percentage as HDD, that's why RAID-0 looks like a good option:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2365767/feed-your-greed-for-speed-by-installing-ssds-in-raid-0.html
 
(Article is 18 months old however, so situation may have changed a little).
 
I would love to see a benchmark of 4 x 500Mb SDD vs 2 x 1GB SSD's vs 2GB SSD

Would like to see the comparison between the old SATA and the new PCIe with the ssd's above!!

With hidef video editing you are often streaming lots of data. I think most DAW users aren't average users, and the more tracks the slower it becomes. I'm also a developer so I run a lot of server applications. Hard Drives are definitely my bottleneck..