Samsung releases magician command line tool for linux – Samsung SSD drives

By JC | February 16, 2015 | Comments 4 comments

Magician DC

Magician is Samsung’s disk management and diagnostic software for it’s line of SSD solid-state drives. Magician allows you to benchmark your drive, upgrade firmware, check S.M.A.R.T, configure drive encryption, and over provisioning.

Until now, this tool has only been available on Windows PCs, today the linux command line version of Magician is available and supports linux distros RHEL, CentOS, and Ubuntu.

Samsung describes this new tools as follows.

Samsung SSD Magician DC software is designed to help users with easy-to-use disk management and diagnostic features for server and data center usage. This software is only for Samsung SSD products.

Samsung Magician DC Features

List – Detect list of attached Samsung SSD Drives in the system
Firmware Update – Update the old firmware of the SSD to the new version
Erase – Erase data on the SSDby issuing an ATA Format Unit command
Overprovision – Resize the user capacity of the SSD
TRIM – Issue trim command to the SSD
S.M.A.R.T – Display smart information and log temperature of the connected Samsung SSD drive, and estimate the lifetime of Samsung SSD
SET MAX – Set the maximum address of the Samsung SSD to change its user capacity
Write Cache – Enable/disable the write cache of the Samsung SSD
SCT Cache Status – Get SCT write cache state of the disk.
Disk Info – Display current overprovisioning value, current set max value, state of write cache etc. of specified Samsung SSD
Command History – Display history of the previously executed commands
Help – Display the command line options

Understanding SSD Over Provisioning

The most important thing you can do to increase the reliability and performance of an SSD is to over provision some space at the end of the drive. This simple task is often overlooked, ignored, or plain misunderstood. Over Provisioning is leaving raw unpartitioned space at the end of the drive so that the SSD controller can remap data from worn memory cells on the SSD hard drive. Samsung recommends a 10% over provisioning rate so on a 250GB SSD drive you should have 23.85GB of OP space reserved.