Description
Two years into an SSD's life, boots feel a touch slower and big writes stutter now and then — is the drive dying, or is it in your head? Windows only ever says the status is good. Samsung Magician lays the drive's internals out instead: total bytes written, temperature history, the full S.M.A.R.T. table and remaining life percentage, plus sequential and random benchmarks you can hold up against the factory figures. After that you actually know.
It is Samsung's own tool and only works with their consumer SSDs — the 980, 990, T7, T9 and relatives — so other brands get nothing from it. Firmware updates run through it too, which saves digging through model pages on the support site.
Drive dashboard: health, current temperature, remaining life and the last benchmark on one screen, with model, serial, firmware and interface speed in the details pane.
Performance benchmark: sequential throughput and random IOPS measured and shown next to the drive's rated numbers, making any degradation plain.
Firmware updates: detects the installed firmware and offers newer builds, so performance and compatibility fixes do not require hunting down flash files.
Diagnostic scan: short and full modes walk the media block by block and surface bad blocks and read errors early.
Optimisation and over-provisioning: trigger TRIM manually, or carve out reserved space as over-provisioning, which visibly steadies write speed under sustained heavy writing.
Secure Erase and encryption: wipe the drive completely, use PSID Revert to unlock an encrypted drive whose password is gone, or switch on hardware encryption — the step to run before a drive changes hands or gets retired.
Write cache and thermals: toggle write caching, review the temperature history and set alert thresholds, which matters for a fast NVMe crammed into a laptop.
It is Samsung's own tool and only works with their consumer SSDs — the 980, 990, T7, T9 and relatives — so other brands get nothing from it. Firmware updates run through it too, which saves digging through model pages on the support site.
Features
Drive dashboard: health, current temperature, remaining life and the last benchmark on one screen, with model, serial, firmware and interface speed in the details pane.
Performance benchmark: sequential throughput and random IOPS measured and shown next to the drive's rated numbers, making any degradation plain.
Firmware updates: detects the installed firmware and offers newer builds, so performance and compatibility fixes do not require hunting down flash files.
Diagnostic scan: short and full modes walk the media block by block and surface bad blocks and read errors early.
Optimisation and over-provisioning: trigger TRIM manually, or carve out reserved space as over-provisioning, which visibly steadies write speed under sustained heavy writing.
Secure Erase and encryption: wipe the drive completely, use PSID Revert to unlock an encrypted drive whose password is gone, or switch on hardware encryption — the step to run before a drive changes hands or gets retired.
Write cache and thermals: toggle write caching, review the temperature history and set alert thresholds, which matters for a fast NVMe crammed into a laptop.
