Samsung Magician on Ubuntu 14.04

Question

I have replaced my laptop's HDD with a Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250GB and installed Ubuntu 14.04. I know that the Samsung Magician software drastically improves SSD performance, but have not been able to find a way of installing it to Ubuntu. Has anyone been able to or know how to do this?

Solution 1

Installing Samsung Magican on Linux

There is something called samsung magician dc that you can install in linux. It can be downloaded from this link. The manual can be found in that dropdown list. Extract the tarball from the first link, and open the resulting folder. There will be two directories, 64-bit and 32 bit. Open the one corresponding to your operating system. The samsung magician executable is in this folder. The file is a simple binary so make it executable and run it.

Using Samsung Magician On Linux

The usage of samsung magician is described in the manual. Also some information on how to use the software can be obtained from sudo ./magician --help. One thing to know is that you pretty much always have to run magician as superuser. For example to list the samsung disks attached to your system you would use the command
sudo ./magician -L There are many more operations desribed in the manual.

Installing firmware

The Samsung magician dc manual is vague on how to install firmware (specifically on how to lay out the directory containing the firmware). To see how to install firmware see this answer.

Perfomance update

The 840 evo has a performance update which (I think) is independent from firmware and cannot be done with samsung magician dc. I think this performance update was the original goal of your question, so I will address it. The performance update can be found here. I have not done this update, but the installation guide is there.

Solution 2

Samsung (Disk) Magician is a firmware update tool to notify you about new firmware releases and installing them. The firmwares are also offered as ISO images on the Samsung website.

Complementary features to the core functionality:

• Display S.M.A.R.T data and total bytes written
• Run a non-comparable Samsung-specific benchmark
• Run TRIM manually
• Debatable Windows-specific "OS Optimization"
• Customize Over Provisioning
• Create media to execute Secure Erase
• Setup RAPID Mode - a feature that may lead to data corruption or decrease in IOPS
• Manage hardware encryption settings

To summarize: A bloated LCARS-like firmware updater with no secret sauce.

If you really want to install it, you can follow Brian Moths's answer. But the software does not seem to offer anything that you cannot do already on Ubuntu (other than Windows-specific features that would not work on Ubuntu anyway). It's simply a GUI.

Comments

[Charles Green]

Samsung Magician is a piece of windows software, and will not run under Ubuntu. There are several articles written about optimizing SSD performance in Linux and Ubuntu - your time may be better spent researching these.

[Blackbelt]

@CharlesGreen, could you link some?

[Charles Green]

A google search will find them quickly askubuntu.com/questions/1400/how-do-i-optimize-the-os-for-ss‌​ds howtogeek.com/62761/… webupd8.org/2013/01/enable-trim-on-ssd-solid-state-drives.ht‌​ml

[Csabi Vidó]

Regarding the latest 840 EVO performance update, several sites cite Tech Report description that the restoration is built into the firmware, Heise (german) is very vague about it but adds that this is from Samsungs press office but no source provided.

[Faheem Mitha]

The links in the first two sentences of this answer are broken.

[Michael Cole]

samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/download/tools.html - but it only works on data center ssd's.

[Gabriel Staples]

I don't see how this answers the question. So...how do we install Samsung Magician on Ubuntu?

[Gabriel Staples]

Broken links. I've looked all over and can't find out where to download this software anywhere anymore for Linux, as of 26 Jan. 2018. :(

[Csabi Vidó]

You don't need Magician to update the firmware. I just checked, the firmware ISO images are still available in the section for Mac users. For other features of this software you can find alternatives or explanations why it's not recommended or a better solution to the problem. We're running into the XY problem here. If you'd tell us what you actually want to do we may solve your problem despite Magician being apparently not available anymore or working in different ways.

[Gabriel Staples]

My question is, then: How do I specify the overprovisioning amount on the SSD in Linux Ubuntu without having Magician installed on a Windows machine with the SSD? I'd like to: 1) Display S.M.A.R.T data and total bytes written, 2) Run a non-comparable Samsung-specific benchmark, 3) Customize Over Provisioning, 4) Create media to execute Secure Erase, 5) Manage hardware encryption settings, and 6) have clear instructions on how to update firmware using Linux Ubuntu in case any new firmware is released.

[Gabriel Staples]

I found some of the answers to my own questions: 1) use gsmartcontrol and to calculate total bytes written multiply LBAs written by the block size, which is usually 512, 3) just leave unpartitioned space on the drive--I describe it in my tutorial here: electricrcaircraftguy.com/2018/01/…, and for the other ones I'm sure there's individual work-arounds. I suppose we just don't need Samsung's "Magician" tool, and it especially misleads consumers about Over-Provisioning--as though Samsung Magician was required to implement that when in fact it's not.

[Csabi Vidó]

Good that you found a solution for you problem, not sure about the usage of 512 as blocksize, on flash it typically is 4k.

[Gabriel Staples]

On the "Identity" tab of my gsmartcontrol menu it shows "Sector Size 512 bytes logical/physical." Then, on the "Attributes" tab it shows "Total LBAs Written" as "3749169342" in the "Raw value" column. I can then calculate 3749169342*512/(1024^4) = 1.75 TiB Written. This number corresponds well to the number Samsung Magician reports in Windows when I log into Windows instead of Linux. So...512 bytes it is. Maybe I misused the word "block"?

[Csabi Vidó]

May be I'm wrong but I think you're seeing that due to emulation en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format#512e and 4k would still be better.

[Gabriel Staples]

I'm not sure what you mean when you say it "would still be better." All I know is: Total_LBAs_written*512/(1024^4) gives me the correct answer for TiB written, and Total_LBAs_written*4096/(1024^4) does not. I'm not setting that number, I'm just using it in a calculation.

[Aleksandr Dubinsky]

@GabrielStaples Samsung stopped supporting Magician for Linux for consumer SSDs. Check out AUR for download links to the old version (under "Sources"): aur.archlinux.org/packages/samsung_magician-consumer-ssd

[Twonky]

DC Toolkit for Linux 2.1 supports the display of 870 QVO and 970 EVO Plus and even shows my Western Digital HDDs.