Samsung Magician

sygnus21 · 21 Apr 2020

Caledon Ken said:

Long shot but thought I would throw out anyway. Is it that the unallocated space is not at end of drive? May take some research or someone with experience can just say No.

To me, it looks like that partition had data but then the drive was later deleted - as if the OP wiped it.

As for overprovisioning; here's my "opinion"... SSD drives already come with a small amount of reserved space for garbage collection so I personally see no need to allocate any more. None of the 5 SSD drives in my system have any unallocated space as I see no reason for it. On the other hand I also I make sure none of the drives are over 70 percent filled - something I've been doing even back in the HDD days when drives were less than a TB.

In short, unless a specific reason, there's no need to waste storage space on something that's not going to be an issue unless you simply don't pay attention to your drive space.

My two cents.

nikki605 · 21 Apr 2020

I don't disagree. I figured since the OP function was there in SM, it ought to work.

sygnus21 · 21 Apr 2020

nikki605 said:

I figured since the OP function was there in SM, it ought to work.

100 percent Agree with that part.

nikki605 · 22 Apr 2020

I had contacted Samsung support via email a couple days ago. I finally got a response this morning:

"I believe the reason Magician is having an issue identifying the drive is because your drive has not allocated the Unallocated Space at the very end of the drive. Usually Unallocated Space is at the very end of the drive where the formatted partitions or in the front. No worries, since you have manually set aside 10% of unallocated space the controller will handle Over Provisioning for you, not Magician. You are fine to leave the drive as is."

To test this theory, I may just go ahead and delete the Q:/ partition since I'm not using it anyway. I had to laugh at the way the tech started his/her reply: "I believe..."

Doesn't exactly instill confidence in Samsung support's product knowledge.

More to follow.

krzemien · 22 Apr 2020

Pshaw! Please see the screen from my PC I supplied in post #1089:

Samsung Magician

nikki605 · 22 Apr 2020

krzemien said:

Pshaw! Please see the screen from my PC I supplied in post #1089:

Samsung Magician

I know. I was thinking of your post as I was reading their email response. LOL

I'm still thinking of deleting the Q:/ partition just to see if I can prove them wrong.

krzemien · 22 Apr 2020

Just to follow on my previous comment though: did you have a chance to read about GUIDs etc.?

Worth you downloading this chappy (for example):

Best Free Partition Manager for Windows | MiniTool Partition Wizard Free
Free Partition Manager Software for Windows - AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard

And correlating what you're seeing with GUID Partition Table - Wikipedia (for example, there are other sources available, obviously)?

Bit of a shot in the dark, but who knows?

How to Change Partition Type ID Easily? (2 Ways Included)

nikki605 · 22 Apr 2020

No, I haven't read about GUIDs yet. I'll have to make some time.

I already have AOMEI Pro from when I did the Win7/Win10 dual boot and needed to delete/move/resize partitions when I finally removed Win7.

Anyway, I deleted the Q:/ partition with Diskmgmt while my wife was away from the PC which gave me 106.25GB unallocated space at the end of the drive. And guess what... no joy! Same problem! Are either of us surprised? NO! LOL

I'll email my results back to Samsung support shortly and see what they have to say then.

- - - Updated - - -

krzemien said:

Did you try earlier (v5.x) version of Samsung Magician as has been suggested there?

I found version 5.3.1 downloaded and installed it. That version doesn't even have OP. OP was a new feature in version 6.0.

Bree · 22 Apr 2020

nikki605 said:

I found version 5.3.1 downloaded and installed it. That version doesn't even have OP.

You can download 6.0.0 from the Internet Archive Wayback machine here:

SSD Tools & Software | Download | Samsung V-NAND SSD | Samsung Semiconductor Global Website

nikki605 · 22 Apr 2020

Bree said:

You can download 6.0.0 from the Internet Archive Wayback machine here:

SSD Tools & Software | Download | Samsung V-NAND SSD | Samsung Semiconductor Global Website

Nope. Version 6.0.0 gives me the same error message.

Samsung Magician

Samsung Support Chimes In