Got a nice surprise yesterday--I routinely checked on a new version of Magician--and it told me once again that I was using the latest version of the software...but as I usually do I followed the link to the Samsung site--usually I would expect to see the version number 4.9.7 prominently featured. The day that I made my initial post in this thread the Samsung site was still showing 4.9.7 as the latest version. This time, however, there was no version number listed--and the download was smaller than the 4.9.7 version of the software--so I figured I had nothing lose by downloading it--and Lo and Behold--at long last it was Magician 5.0...! Best part? It's got a new interface *and* it works as it should under the latest builds of Win10x64...! Yes, finally the Magician software properly initializes the driver under WIn10x64, secure-boot On! Better late than never from Samsung! Thought you might like to know! Merry Christmas... AHCI bus and SATA bus now recognized by the Magician software.
@WaltC. What does it do? Why would I need it if I'm already running the latest drivers? Why wouldn't you at least post the link so people can update their old version? What's "rapid mode"?
Rapid mode is not supported for PCIe NVMe SSD either (like new 960 Pro and Evo). Forget rapid mode and buy a PCIe NVMe SSD and you get real speed, not just great speed test results ... About Magician, it will let you know the latest firmware and update it when available as well as some valueable info, like your drive condition based on SMART, your interface, driver and TRIM status. Samsung NVMe 2.0 driver is already available. It is clearly faster as MS standard NVMe driver.
Bingo...all Rapid Mode is is a ~2GB cache in your main system ram...the drive itself is not one bit faster with RM on. It will cause problems especially in 8GB or < systems running programs/games that require a lot of ram--I had a few Rapid-Mode crashes in Witcher 3 when I was running 8 GBs system ram that disappeared as soon as I disabled Rapid Mode. Before the 5.0 drivers I had already disabled Rapid Mode--it's simply a marketing gimmick--does not actually speed up the the SSD at all... You don't need to use Magician to use the drive, but I like it to function properly because *it should*! It's the principle of the thing. With the earlier versions of Magician in Win10 the software wasn't initializing properly because of a flawed signature and Win10 wouldn't let part of the Magician software load at boot, and the result was that Magician would tell you that you didn't have either a Sata bus or an AHCI mode...when of course you did else the drive wouldn't even function. Finally at last they fixed it! Changed the GUI, too...
If you don't know what it is and you aren't running Magician then you need the answers to none of your questions... Hint: anyone running Magician already has the link they need to get the 5.x version. If you don't own an SSD EVO by Samsung then none of this concerns you.