SSD "software"

[mimosa]

I'm thinking of getting a solid state drive (such as the Samsung 840). Some such drives claim to come with software to manage memory usage and prolong life.

Does anyone have any experience of how this works? For instance, if I do

Code: Select all

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ssd

will I wipe said software? Is it worth having, anyway, for ordinary use?

The ideal would clearly be for anything like that to be completely invisible (I'd say "transparent", but in one sense I mean the opposite) for any use fo the device for its intended purpose of storing data. So really, firmware, not software. But is that how it is?

Also, more generally, does anyone have any other recommendations?

[thenktor]

The drive's firmware handles everything for you. Just use it as every other HD.

[mimosa]

Thanks Thenktor

[mimosa]

On further investigation, it seems Samsung's "magician software" is something else. Has anyone seen this? Should I safely be able to ignore it and assume there is still some firmware silently doing all that's needed in the background?

Here is a link with some screenshots:

http://thessdreview.com/daily-news/late ... -software/

EDIT

On further investigation, I'm reasonably confident that the answer is the "magician" can be safely ignored - though you might want to install it at some point (and then uninstall) to update the firmware.

[shanek54]

Hi mimosa,
This might be of some use to you...
http://www.salixos.org/wiki/index.php/H ... une_an_SSD

Regards,
Shane.

PS Samsungs Magician software adds a nice GUI to stuff that is generally available from your OS. Might be worth a look, if only for interests sake.

[mimosa]

Thank you, that's an excellent wiki entry, with some good links, too.