What Is Samsung Magician? Does It Support Your Drive?

What is Samsung Magician software? If you are using a Samsung SSD, it could be a wonderful disk manager for you. However, if you are using a disk of other brands, some features of this application would be unavailable. In this case, another professional tool for disk management, MiniTool Partition Wizard, could help you.

What Is Samsung Magician?

Samsung Magician, also called Samsung SSD Magician Software, is a powerful suite of optimization tools provided by Samsung business conglomerate. The Samsung Magician software has a dark theme and it can be used to monitor drive health, customize your SSD, and maximize performance.

To help users understand the software, Samsung divides its features into three parts in the latest version: Drive Information, Drive Management, and Data Management. Let’s see what you can do with these features.

Drive Information

In the Drive Information part, you will get a brief overview of all drives connected to your computer. In this screen, you can get an easy access to key indicators of your hard drive’s health along with TB Written, Temperature (whether it is normal), Benchmark results, as well as the used and free volumes of your hard drives.

Tip: You might need to manually refresh the disk list in Drive Information for Magician to make sure that all the connected disks are detected.

Drive Management

The Drive Management of Samsung Magician software can help you maintain your drive’s health and boost performance. It contains 5 features. Let’s see them one by one.

Drive Details: With this feature, you can learn about more detailed information about the selected disk, including Drive Health, Temperature, Serial Number, Interface, Firmware, AHCI Mode, Total Volume, and Volume Detail. It also includes S.M.A.R.T check which inspects your SSD and detects possible drive failure before it happens.
Performance Benchmark: You can check the drive’s performance with Performance Benchmark. The testing process will take a few minutes. Please wait patiently and do not proceed with other operations during the process. In the Benchmark results, you can see the sequential/random read/write speed of the drive.
Diagnostic Scan: You can decide a partial or full scan for your hard drive to identify and fix potential problems and maintain your drive’s capabilities.
Over Provisioning: This feature can help you allocate a certain capacity of the disk to available space to improve the performance and lifespan.
Performance Optimization: If you want to improve the performance of your hard drive without Over Provisioning feature, you can try Performance Optimization. It allows you to turn on RAPID mode and TRIM scheduling.

Tip: RAPID refers to Real-time Accelerated Processing of I/O Data which optimizes system performance by using DRAM as a cache for storage. RAPID mode requires 1GHz or faster processor, at least 2GB DRAM, 50MB free disk space, and NTFS file system. TRIM deletes data from blocks that are no longer used to improve the performance of the storage device.

Data Management

The last part of Samsung Magician is Data Management which can help you manage and protect valuable data on your disk. There are 3 features in this part.

Secure Erase: This can help you permanently deletes data stored in your hard drive. If you need to sell your disk out, you can use this feature to make sure that the information stored on it is permanently gone. You need to create a bootable USB drive during the process. This feature is not supported for Windows 8/8.1.
PSID Revert: PSID Revert is a new feature which allows you to unlock and reset your drive to its factory setting by entering the 32–character PSID password printed on the drive label. All data on the target drive will be deleted in the unencrypting process.
Encrypted Drive: This feature will help you encrypt storage devices with BitLocker to prevent your private and sensitive data from being accessed by others who are not trusted.

Apart from the features above, you can find a button for Update at the bottom left corner of the window. It can help you update all the drives to the latest version of firmware.

Samsung Magician doesn’t require the internet connection to run, but you need to connect to the internet if you want to update firmware. And after the update, your PC will be shut down automatically after counting down 20 seconds.

Warning: There is always the risk of data loss while updating the firmware. Before updating the firmware, you should back up your data and close all running applications except Samsung Magician, and please do not power off during the process.

Does My Hard Drive Work with Samsung Magician Software?

After learning about all the features of the Samsung Magician Software, you might want to get it to have a try. To run the software, your PC has to meet the following system requirements:

Operating System: Windows 7/8/8.1/10 (32/64bit).
Disk Capacity: At least 95MB available for installation.
Supported Partition Types: MBR, GPT.

Besides, you need to pay attention that not all hard drives can work with the software.

As you know, the software is designed for Samsung SSDs. Even in this condition, some features are unavailable for Samsung SSDs themselves. Here is a chart from Samsung and you can know the features that are available for a specific Samsung SSD.

In addition, the Samsung Magician software is not compatible with other manufacturers’ SSDs and HDDs, according to Samsung. Therefore, you cannot use certain features especially when your hard drive is of other brands, such as Western Digital, Seagate, etc.

And once you miss a feature, you will get an error message like “the selected drive does not support this feature” or “not supported” in Samsung Magician. Just as the following picture shows.

For a disk that is not Samsung-branded, you can still get some drive information like temperature and volume information. Performance Benchmark should be available for most drives.

However, you will be unable to use most of its advanced features for the disk, including Diagnostic Scan, Over Provisioning, Performance Optimization, Secure Erase, PSID Revert, and Encrypted Drive.

For a USB drive of other brands, there are no available features.

Samsung Magician Alternative

What to do if your hard drive doesn’t support Samsung Magician software? The best way is to find an alternative for its features. Here I recommend MiniTool Partition Wizard for you. It is a professional wonderful disk management tool. It is equipped with a lot of powerful features and some of them are similar to the features of Samsung Magician.

You don’t need to worry about the brands of your hard drive, as MiniTool Partition Wizard is available for almost all the hard drives on the market, including Samsung, Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, SanDisk, and so on. You can also manage your USB drives with it.

Here is the step-by-step guide for two typical features of MiniTool Partition Wizard which can be used as alternatives for Samsung Magician software.

Performance Benchmark Alternative

MiniTool Partition Wizard provides a feature named Disk Benchmark which can be used to measure disk performance for free. It is a nice alternative for Performance Benchmark of Samsung Magician. With this feature, you can test the sequential and random read/write speeds.

Now, let’s see how to use it.

Step 1: Click the following button to download MiniTool Partition Wizard and install it by following the installation wizard.

MiniTool Partition Wizard FreeClick to Download100%Clean & Safe

Step 2: Launch the disk manager to get the main interface, and click Disk Benchmark from the top toolbar.

Step 3: Select the drive you want to test. Then set the provided parameters, including Transfer Size, Total Length, Queue Number, Thread Number, Test Mode, and Cool Down Time.

Tip: Please make sure the target drive has been assigned with a drive letter. Otherwise, you can’t perform the operation.

Step 4: Click Start to run Disk Benchmark. You need to wait for a while to get the test results.

After the scanning, the test results will be displayed as a graphical chart and you can view it intuitively.

Secure Erase Alternative

When you don’t need your old disk anymore, you might want to throw it away or sell it out. To protect your information, you should erase all the data on the disk before you take any actions. For Samsung SSD users, Samsung SSD Magician software might be a nice assistant. But how to erase data if your hard drive doesn’t support Samsung Magician?

In this case, you can use MiniTool Partition Wizard. After performing Wipe Disk with this tool, the data on the disk can’t be recovered by most data recovery software. Now, let’s see how to erase data via MiniTool Partition Wizard.

Step 1: Run MiniTool Partition Wizard. When you get the main interface, right-click the disk you want to erase and select Wipe Disk.

MiniTool Partition Wizard FreeClick to Download100%Clean & Safe

Note: If you are planning to wipe your system disk, you need to upgrade MiniTool Partition Wizard to Pro Ultimate edition. Then create a bootable USB drive and boot your PC from the drive before wiping.

Step 2: Choose a wiping method and click OK. MiniTool Partition Wizard provides you with 5 wiping methods. They get different results and spend different time. The latter two methods will procure a better effect and take relatively longer time. You can choose one according to your needs.

Step 3: When you go back to the main interface, click Apply from the bottom left corner of the application to execute the pending operations.

Tip: If you want to learn about more applications for erasing data, you can refer to the following post: Top 10 Free Hard Drive/Disk Data Wipe Software for Windows 10/8/7.

In addition to the features mentioned above, you also can use MiniTool Partition Wizard to create/move/resize/copy/delete partitions, recover lost data, change cluster size, rebuild MBR, check for file system errors, and do many other managing works. For more information about this software, you can get help from the user manual.

How can you manage your hard drive if it doesn’t support Samsung Magician? Here is an alternative for Samsung Magician and you can have a try. Click to Tweet

Bottom Line

What is Samsung Magician? I guess you get the answer now. You can keep using it if you have a Samsung SSD. If you are using a hard drive of other brands, it should be a wise choice to find an alternative.

We’re glad if you share your ideas and experience in the following comment zone. And for any problems about MiniTool Partition Wizard software, please don’t hesitate to contact us via [email protected].

What Is Samsung Magician FAQ

Is Samsung Magician free?

Yes, Samsung Magician software is designed for Samsung SSDs, and you can download and use it without spending money. This software is incompatible with hard drives of other brands and you will miss some features if you are not using a Samsung SSD.

Is Samsung Magician any good?

For Samsung SSDs, Samsung Magician should be a powerful application for disk management. It comes with various features, such as Drive Information, Performance Benchmark, Diagnostic Scan, Over Provisioning, Secure Erase, etc. They are useful and might help you a lot. But it’s not good for other hard drives, as most features will be unavailable.

How to use Samsung Magician?

Download Samsung Magician from the Samsung official website.
Run the downloaded setup file and install the software by following the onscreen instructions.
Launch Samsung Magician and you will get the access to its features.
Select the feature you want to use from the left pane, and operate referring to the instructions in the right pane.

About The Author

Sherry

Position: Columnist

Sherry has been a staff editor of MiniTool for a year. She has received rigorous training about computer and digital data in company. Her articles focus on solutions to various problems that many Windows users might encounter and she is excellent at disk partitioning. She has a wide range of hobbies, including listening to music, playing video games, roller skating, reading, and so on. By the way, she is patient and serious.