How to use Samsung MagicianUpdated 5 days ago

Samsung Magician is Samsung’s official tool for managing their SSDs. It’s a great program that makes it easy to keep your drive’s firmware up to date and check on its overall health. While Magician does offer extra features like performance benchmarks, encryption, and drive optimization, most users will only need it for two things: updating firmware and running health checks.

⚠️Always back up important data before running firmware updates

DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL

• Download the latest version of Samsung Magician
• Run the installer and follow the on-screen instructions
• Once installed, open the software to begin

UPDATING SSD FIRMWARE

Keeping your SSD firmware up to date ensures you have the latest bug fixes, performance improvements, and reliability updates from Samsung.

• Open Samsung Magician and select your Samsung SSD from the list at the top
• On the Drive Details tab, if a newer firmware version is available, Magician will display an update prompt
• Click Update, then follow the on-screen instructions to apply the firmware update
• Once the firmware update process is complete, it is recommended to safely shut down your system and leave it powered off for 10 seconds before powering it back on again.

CHECKING SSD HEALTH AND RUNNING DIAGNOSTICS

Samsung Magician makes it easy to monitor the condition of your drive and test for potential errors.

• On the Drive Dashboard, you will see an overview of your SSD's Health, Temperature, and Total Bytes Written. If it shows "Good", the drive is in a healthy condition.
• For deeper checks, open the Diagnostic Scan menu. Here you can choose from different scan modes:
  • Short Scan - This test checks the data integrity of the SSD. It writes 1 GB of file to the disk and compares it to the original file, which takes around 53 seconds. As it creates 1GB size of file on the disk, it needs support from the file system, and the space of 5GB  larger is required on the disk for stable use of the feature
  • Full Scan - Full scan reads the entire LBA of the disk to locate any errors. The time consumed can be longer depending on the drive's capacity.
  • SMART Self-tests - Checks the SSD features internally using S.M.A.R.T.(Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Report Technique) feature. Short mode and Extended mode can be selected and performed. As Extended checks data integrity, the time consumption can be longer, depending on the disk storage space

Short scan and Full scan can attempt recovery when errors are found in the drive after diagnosis. Clicking the Recovery button that appears when an error is detected, it proceeds with the recovery process to fix the driver error in Samsung Magician. The recovery feature is not supported in SMART Self-Test.