These days everyone is talking about SSD or Solid state drives. SSD is much faster than Platter Hard Disk, silent and much more efficient. On The same time they complicated to maintain as well. Not All OS support the TRIM or Garbage Collection which is basically responsible for optimum usage of speed and Performance they have. If you purchased a SSD and you install it with and OS which does not support either of these you won’t be able to see significant performance improvement. and More time you keep your Computer On performance will keep coming down making it at par with IDE or SATA drive.
Most of SSD supports TRIM and not garbage Collection and at present only WIndows7 and Windows 2008 support this so Essentially if you plan to use any of these 2 OS with your SSD then only you should purchase it. But Question is how to measure the performance ?
If you planning to Buy Samsung Solid state Drive, good news is that Samsung has released a new tool called SSD Magician. This tool will provide you various information, will do Performance Optimization, firmware update, data cloning and will also be able to benchmark performance of your Samsung SSD. This utility can be used with other brands as well but in that case it will have limited functionality.
Following function are supported by Samsung SSD Magician Tool —
- System Information – it will display all the necessary system information you need to see about your computer and disks connected to it.
- Performance Optimization – This utility is available only if you have a Samsung SSD connected. This will run Garbage collection and will in turn improve performance This can be scheduled to run regularly and only required if your OS does not support TRIM>
- Firmware Update — This will create a bootable USB Disk which can update the firmware of your Samsung SSD.
Samsung SSD Magician is a must for all those users who running an OS which does not support TRIM and using SSD. As without this tool you won’t be able to experience the real performance of a Solid Sate Drive.