Software & Testing Procedures
Now you don’t need any software to operate the drive, but Samsung does offer their Magician Software to download which is probably the best SSD toolbox software I’ve ever used.
Opening up the software you’ll get a list of your installed drives with drive health and temperature. You can run a benchmark as well.
I am not going to go over every option in the Magician software, but there are some interesting things you can do. The first is Over Provisioning. Here you can changed the default over provisioning amount.
Something you always want to have in SSD toolbox software is secure erase and you’ll find that in the Magician software.
The Magician software will also allow you to encrypt the drive.
With the drive installed and formatted we have 465GB of usable space.
Opening up CrystalDiskMark we can see that the drive is using NVMe Express 1.3.
For testing the drive we will be using the following benchmarking programs, we have provided links to each so you can run the benchmarks on your drive for comparison.
Sisoftware Sandra Physical Disks Benchmark (download)
ATTO Disk Benchmark (download)
CrystalDiskMark 64bit (download)
AS SSD Benchmark (download)
Anvil Storage Utility Professional (download)
AIDA64 Storage Benchmark (download)
We also made these optimization changes…
– No power saving options in the BIOS
– ACHI enabled in the BIOS
– Windows 10 User Account Control (UAC) is disabled
– Windows 10 power saving settings are disabled
So let’s get into testing!
