# Memory leak found in Samsung SSD Magician



## trparky (Aug 26, 2022)

So, here I am, and I found a memory leak in Samsung SSD Magician. And I mean serious one, the kind that only after three or four days, all of your system RAM will be used and potentially crash your system. How do I go about reporting this issue to Samsung because I can't for the life of me find a contact to send this to info to Samsung.

Oh sure, there's Customer Service but I need to get into contact with someone who can I send technical details about what's happening.


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## ThrashZone (Aug 26, 2022)

Hi,
I take it off startup so don't believe it can do this.

I sure CS can receive data.


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## trparky (Aug 26, 2022)

And now I'm betting you're wondering what this memory leak is.

In Samsung SSD Magician there's an option in the settings called "Collect data about drive's status and performance". This, of course, gives you pretty data in Samsung SSD Magician about things like Read and Write Speed along with Read and Write Queue Depth. This is where the memory leak comes into play. I was over a period of time watching my system memory get eaten so I decided to do some looking around and downloaded a utility called RamMap from SysInternals and I noticed a rather huge amount data being used for memory mapped files. So, I went to the Files Summary tab and sorted all memory mapped files according to size and there to my horror there was a history data file being used by Samsung SSD Magician located in "C:\ProgramData\Samsung\Samsung Magician" and it was using up to nearly 16 GBs of system RAM.

Turning off "Collect data about drive's status and performance" and rebooting fixes this issue, however I'd still like to report this issue to Samsung so as to get this issue fixed. Obviously, the driver that's responsible is not closing file handles properly and leaving them open.


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## Bill_Bright (Aug 26, 2022)

trparky said:


> And now I'm betting you're wondering what this memory leak is.


Actually, I'm wondering why you use Samsung Magician. 

I have Samsung SSDs in 3 systems here and have never found the need to use Samsung Magician - except once early on to "Secure Erase" a SSD. So I installed SM, ran Secure Erase on the drive, then uninstalled SM and no problems running without. 

FTR, Windows knows how to optimally use and maintain SSDs just fine. No 3rd party app needed. 

You can call Samsung - see Samsung Complaints (complaintsdepartment.com)


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## trparky (Aug 26, 2022)

True, it's not needed but it's nice to see what the SSD is doing behind the scenes. Current temperature, proper interpretation of SMART data, that kind of thing. But I suppose that it's not really needed.


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## MachineLearning (Aug 26, 2022)

trparky said:


> True, it's not needed but it's nice to see what the SSD is doing behind the scenes. Current temperature, proper interpretation of SMART data, that kind of thing. But I suppose that it's not really needed.


CrystalDiskInfo will do all of that without memory leaks.


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## trparky (Aug 26, 2022)

MachineLearning said:


> CrystalDiskInfo will do all of that without memory leaks.


And it's guaranteed to interpret the SMART data properly? Because damn do these manufacturers have funny ways of presenting their data and giving you ideas of what is normal and what isn't.

Hell, a number of years ago the only reason why I found a drive was about to die on me was because I had a hunch and loaded Seatools (from Seagate) and told it to do a test, sure enough... dying drive. Yet, every other tool like HWInfo and CrystalDiskInfo said nothing. Apparently, Seagate was doing something very weird with their SMART data which was a red flag to indicate that the drive was indeed dying. Needless to say, I bought a new drive and pulled my data off the drive as fast as I could but in the end, I lost no data.

I don't know, has third-party software gotten better at interpreting this kind of data than it was like back a number of years ago?


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## ThrashZone (Aug 26, 2022)

Hi,
Seen some bad info from magician about 870 evo issues 
It always stated normal/ good when the things were the opposite.


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## A Computer Guy (Aug 26, 2022)

trparky said:


> And now I'm betting you're wondering what this memory leak is.
> 
> In Samsung SSD Magician there's an option in the settings called "Collect data about drive's status and performance". This, of course, gives you pretty data in Samsung SSD Magician about things like Read and Write Speed along with Read and Write Queue Depth. This is where the memory leak comes into play. I was over a period of time watching my system memory get eaten so I decided to do some looking around and downloaded a utility called RamMap from SysInternals and I noticed a rather huge amount data being used for memory mapped files. So, I went to the Files Summary tab and sorted all memory mapped files according to size and there to my horror there was a history data file being used by Samsung SSD Magician located in "C:\ProgramData\Samsung\Samsung Magician" and it was using up to nearly 16 GBs of system RAM.
> 
> Turning off "Collect data about drive's status and performance" and rebooting fixes this issue, however I'd still like to report this issue to Samsung so as to get this issue fixed. Obviously, the driver that's responsible is not closing file handles properly and leaving them open.


What version if Magician you using?


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## trparky (Aug 26, 2022)

A Computer Guy said:


> What version if Magician you using?


7.1.1


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## P4-630 (Aug 26, 2022)

Using hibernate/fast startup?

I'm not using that and I uninstalled Magician 7.1.1 because it produced errors in reliability history.
Magician has still some issues on windows 11, I'm waiting for a new version to try...


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## A Computer Guy (Aug 26, 2022)

you could try the service center








						SSD Service Center | Support | Samsung Semiconductor Global
					

Samsung Customer Service Center Information. Samsung values your business and always attempts to provide you the best quality of service.




					semiconductor.samsung.com


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## Bill_Bright (Aug 26, 2022)

trparky said:


> And it's guaranteed to interpret the SMART data properly?


You could run both and compare. 

That said, who's to say Samsung is doing correctly? I am not saying Samsung is fudging the data - but they could.


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## delshay (Aug 26, 2022)

trparky said:


> True, it's not needed but it's nice to see what the SSD is doing behind the scenes. Current temperature, proper interpretation of SMART data, that kind of thing. But I suppose that it's not really needed.



You forgot It also updates your firmware. It now supports firmware update for portable SSD, well it leased my SSD, updated my T5 a few months back.  ..Besides all this I like to know any of my Samsung SSD are fake.


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## MachineLearning (Aug 26, 2022)

trparky said:


> And it's guaranteed to interpret the SMART data properly? Because damn do these manufacturers have funny ways of presenting their data and giving you ideas of what is normal and what isn't.
> 
> Hell, a number of years ago the only reason why I found a drive was about to die on me was because I had a hunch and loaded Seatools (from Seagate) and told it to do a test, sure enough... dying drive. Yet, every other tool like HWInfo and CrystalDiskInfo said nothing. Apparently, Seagate was doing something very weird with their SMART data which was a red flag to indicate that the drive was indeed dying. Needless to say, I bought a new drive and pulled my data off the drive as fast as I could but in the end, I lost no data.
> 
> I don't know, has third-party software gotten better at interpreting this kind of data than it was like back a number of years ago?


Literally just try it if you want to know if it works with your drives.


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## ThrashZone (Aug 26, 2022)

delshay said:


> You forgot It also updates your firmware. It now supports firmware update for portable SSD, well it leased my SSD, updated my T5 a few months back.  ..Besides all this I like to know any of my Samsung SSD are fake.


Hi,
Magician also considers the utility it's self as firmware so I'd rather not blindly trust it to do anything personally.


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## R-T-B (Aug 27, 2022)

Bill_Bright said:


> You could run both and compare.
> 
> That said, who's to say Samsung is doing correctly? I am not saying Samsung is fudging the data - but they could.


Yes, but if anyone qualified is to read the hex smart value, I'd say the manufacturer is pretty high up there.


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## Bill_Bright (Aug 27, 2022)

R-T-B said:


> Yes, but if anyone qualified is to read the hex smart value, I'd say the manufacturer is pretty high up there.


I agree - or at least feel one would hope.

To be sure, I typically am one to recommend users use the drive maker's own diagnostics programs too (rather than 3rd party tools beyond chkdsk) when they encounter problems. I base that on the fact I would assume the maker is the most qualified. So we are on the same page with that philosophy; that is, the maker knows best.

However, SM is not really a diagnostics program and I personally consider it as yet another unnecessary, bloated and intrusive [nearly] "crapware" program manufacturers constantly try to "foist" on us under the pretense it is needed - very much in the same manner laptop makers pre-load extras we don't need, and especially printer makers who attempt to foist all kinds of junk on us - when the reality is, all we really need is the basic drivers which very often are already integrated with the OS.

So the part that bothers me the most is how these otherwise totally reputable manufacturers market all these extra resource consuming programs as though (1) we need them and (2) how they often imply they "improve performance" - when in fact, neither is true.

Again, today's operating systems know how to optimally use and maintain SSDs just fine without any 3rd party software stuck in the middle, starting with the OS , running in real-time, consuming resources.

It is foisting of extras that often cause users to complain (and rightfully slow) that their computers are bogging down and no longer run as well as they used to. No wonder! Every time they install a new program piece of hardware, some "auto-update" program gets foisted on the system too - if the user is being watchful.  



delshay said:


> You forgot It also updates your firmware.


Yes, be we don't need yet another program running all the time, constantly phoning home to check to see if a new update is available. I note that firmware and driver updates (with the possible exception of graphics drivers) typically fall into the category of, "_if it ain't broke, don't fix it!_" 

For sure, I don't have a problem running SM "manually" to check for updates, or to check S.M.A.R.T. status, or run a utility command on it like Secure Erase. I don't like, or see the need to have SM start with Windows every time we start our computers.


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## rethcirE (Aug 28, 2022)

As others stated, run it manually as needed for things like firmware or health checks. I suppose "as needed" are the magic words here (pun?). I rarely, if ever, need to know any information about my drive unless there is a problem. I check for firmware updates maybe twice a year; the software gets opened manually and then it's closed and sits dormant for another 6 months. If there was/is a memory leak problem I never noticed it in the 5 minutes I used it.


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## Kabouter Plop (Nov 24, 2022)

Does it still have a memory leak ?


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## trparky (Nov 24, 2022)

Kabouter Plop said:


> Does it still have a memory leak ?


I haven't tested it. I don't even actively run it anymore.


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## Kabouter Plop (Nov 25, 2022)

trparky said:


> I haven't tested it. I don't even actively run it anymore.



It always runs for me im playing a lot of wow lately and getting a ton of system freezes you think it may be related seeing lots of reports as well tho that wow is having a memory leak but if not seen my memory usage go up once.


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## Marstg (Nov 25, 2022)

Running Magician 7.2.0 and Win10 and no issues. Tonight I deactivated that option. But I also had a memory leak but I was running with 0MB swap file and with 32GB RAM every 2-3 days my ram was getting full, had to reboot to solve the issue. The issue disappeared when I reactivated the virtual memory, just 2GB. I have a Samsung 980 500GB on the latest firmware.


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## trparky (Nov 25, 2022)

Marstg said:


> Running with 0MB swap file and 32GB and 32GB RAM and every 2-3 days my ram was getting full, had to reboot to solve the issue. Issue disappeared when I reactivated the virtual memory, just 2GB. I have a Samsung 980 500GB on the latest firmware.


One might think that if you have enough system RAM you can disable the page file but that's not true at all. Windows still needs the page file no matter how much RAM you have. You could have 64 GBs or even 128 GBs of RAM, the page file is still needed.

Should I Disable the Page File if My Computer Has a Lot of RAM? (howtogeek.com)


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## Vayra86 (Nov 25, 2022)

When I got my 830, I wasn't very happy with Magician. Lots of frills, no necessity. Uninstalled within a month.

Its a good habit. Third party vendor specific app? Kill it! Get something universal or just let the OS run it. Principles we all know apply. Larger userbase, no commercial gain is the best location for these 'helpful' applications to exist in the market. Its either free, or you're the pawn and you will eventually run into some crappy or lacking update piece of code. Its a guarantee.


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## P4-630 (Nov 25, 2022)

Latest version


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## trparky (Nov 25, 2022)

P4-630 said:


> Latest version
> 
> View attachment 271621


It's not that that was causing an issue, you had to dive a lot deeper into the OS to notice the memory leak. Like I stated in my second post of this thread, you had to use specialized utilities to see the memory leak.


trparky said:


> I was over a period of time watching my system memory get eaten so I decided to do some looking around and downloaded a utility called RamMap from SysInternals and I noticed a rather huge amount data being used for memory mapped files. So, I went to the Files Summary tab and sorted all memory mapped files according to size and there to my horror there was a history data file being used by Samsung SSD Magician located in "C:\ProgramData\Samsung\Samsung Magician" and it was using up to nearly 16 GBs of system RAM.


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## P4-630 (Nov 25, 2022)

trparky said:


> It's not that that was causing an issue, you had to dive a lot deeper into the OS to notice the memory leak. Like I stated in my second post of this thread, you had to use specialized utilities to see the memory leak.



I had such issues years ago when I used hibernate/fastboot, since then never used hibernate/fastboot anymore and no more issues with apps eating my RAM...


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## Mr Bill (Nov 25, 2022)

trparky said:


> One might think that if you have enough system RAM you can disable the page file but that's not true at all. Windows still needs the page file no matter how much RAM you have. You could have 64 GBs or even 128 GBs of RAM, the page file is still needed.
> 
> Should I Disable the Page File if My Computer Has a Lot of RAM? (howtogeek.com)


This has been going back and forth for years. Since the pagefile is a disk-based system it would add more write cycles to your SSD. I've never used a page file with any ssd and never had any issues, go figure.


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## ThrashZone (Nov 25, 2022)

Hi,
I'm nearly at system managed page file
I minimize to 16mb and max it at 5gb running 32gb memory ssd's still alive and kicking after years of use.


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## Bill_Bright (Nov 25, 2022)

Mr Bill said:


> This has been going back and forth for years. Since the pagefile is a disk-based system it would add more write cycles to your SSD.


So what? You do make a valid point about this going back and forth for years. But clearly you failed to heed the lessons learned over those years. 

Limited write cycles for SSDs has not been a problem for years now. And frankly, it never was for "normal" computer users. Continuing to spew such nonsense is just spreading ignorance and FUD. 

If you have a fairly recent laptop, odds are it has a SSD only - no hard drive. And by default, it has a Windows managed PF on that SSD. And guess what? No issues either. Go figure. 



Mr Bill said:


> I've never used a page file with any ssd and never had any issues, go figure.


Sure you did. But by refusing to let go of long-held, outdated, obsolete, and no longer applicable beliefs and take the time to learn the true facts, those issues are never realized.  

The PF on even the slowest SSD provides superior performance compared to having the PF on the fastest hard drives. And 99% of use will never come close to reaching the write limits on current generation SSDs. It takes years of constant writes to reach those limits. 

"_Because I always did it that way_", "_I disabled it and didn't see any difference_", and "_limited number of writes on SSDs_" are three of the lamest excuses ever - when it comes to disabling Page Files, current versions of Windows, and Page Files on SSDs. 

"_Because I just wanted to!_" makes much more sense and logical excuse for dinking with the default PF settings than any of those three lame excuses. 

Are there exceptions? Of course. But it is highly unlikely any computer used by any one on this site fits that category.


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## eidairaman1 (Nov 25, 2022)

trparky said:


> So, here I am, and I found a memory leak in Samsung SSD Magician. And I mean serious one, the kind that only after three or four days, all of your system RAM will be used and potentially crash your system. How do I go about reporting this issue to Samsung because I can't for the life of me find a contact to send this to info to Samsung.
> 
> Oh sure, there's Customer Service but I need to get into contact with someone who can I send technical details about what's happening.


So dont have it running in background, only use it for firmware updates


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## trparky (Nov 25, 2022)

eidairaman1 said:


> So dont have it running in background, only use it for firmware updates


That’s exactly what I’ve done.


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## Mr Bill (Nov 25, 2022)

Bill_Bright said:


> So what? You do make a valid point about this going back and forth for years. But clearly you failed to heed the lessons learned over those years.
> 
> Limited write cycles for SSDs has not been a problem for years now. And frankly, it never was for "normal" computer users. Continuing to spew such nonsense is just spreading ignorance and FUD.
> 
> ...


Bill, I didn't expect a sermon,  I was just speaking about my preference, what others do, is really none of my business.


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## Bill_Bright (Nov 25, 2022)

It was not a sermon. It was reporting the facts and putting them in the proper perspective so others reading are not misinformed. 

Implying, as you did, that SSDs today will somehow suffer if one keeps the PF on them is misleading at best - to put it nicely. 

Expressing your preference is fine. I have no problem with that at all. In fact, I will defend your right, with vigor, to do so. But then it needs to be expressed as your preference or opinion. When you imply or suggest something that is not a fact, I will use the same vigor to ensure readers know the true facts. 

To illustrate the facts, note this budget $60 500GB SSD, has a TBW (terabytes written) rating of 300TBW. That means, you would have to fill that 500GB drive up, then delete everything, and fill it up again 600 times before you reached its write limit. How likely is that even with a busy page file?  Very unlikely considering most accesses to PF are reads, not writes. 

FTR, with 1 TB equal to 1000GB, that is 300,000GB.


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## trparky (Nov 25, 2022)

Bill_Bright said:


> Implying, as you did, that SSDs today will somehow suffer if one keeps the PF on them is misleading at best - to put it nicely.


I have owned several SSDs over the last eight or so years and I don't treat them lightly; I use and abuse them. I don't treat them any differently than a traditional hard drive. I don't care if I'm doing unneeded write operations, I don't care if I unzip and process compressed files all the live long day, etc. And do you want to know something folks? Oh yeah, none of them have ever reached the point where I had to retire them due to write operation limits. Not once.

Hell, I still have two smaller SATA SSDs that are just sitting around doing nothing, yet they still have a hell of a lot of life left and I too didn't treat them any differently. I used and abused them too. Again, no limits reached. I only retired them due to upgrading to bigger drives.

So yeah, this worry about reaching some arbitrary write limit is nothing more than a scare tactic, bullshit at worst. Go ahead, use your SSD and don't be afraid. Trust me, it can take a hell of a lot more abuse than you think it can.


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## Mr Bill (Nov 26, 2022)

Bill_Bright said:


> It was not a sermon. It was reporting the facts and putting them in the proper perspective so others reading are not misinformed.


Bill, it's ok, don't get your blood pressure up, everything is going to be ok, trust me, I don't have any patent on misinformation on the internet.


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## ShrimpBrime (Nov 26, 2022)

Mr Bill said:


> Bill, it's ok, don't get your blood pressure up, everything is going to be ok, trust me, I don't have any patent on misinformation on the internet.


Its not the accurate approach though.

Because of just the comment of using it manually disabled, this promotes shutting it off.

But as you can see, the wording and play are a thing.

I do it because I can. Because it's an option to do so. 

When benchmarking and disabling all services, page file is also then disabled. I tried to enable it (w7) with all services disabled, the option is grey'd out. But benchmarking, as I plainly stated once in another thread is something that I do.

Then, once apon a time, try and reflect that the drive space is allocated. When you have enough system memory, it's unused allocated space.

In addition to, even supplied instructions how to measure usage through performance monitor.

I even made a thread and asked at my benching site.

The concensus is to just leave windows managed size.

Because the software engineers designed it that way. For memory management. Which I cannot see a difference when it's enabled or disabled for my personal preferences. 

You just simply need to be careful how you express your actions on your personal set up. Often the meaning of what you said will be taken out of context.

I guess you could start by saying to people not to enable it, but I do Because it suits my personal needs. This does not mean it should become the norm for average users. Windows needs it even if optional to disable it.


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## Mr Bill (Nov 26, 2022)

ShrimpBrime said:


> You just simply need to be careful how you express your actions on your personal set up. Often the meaning of what you said will be taken out of context.


I agree, but my intention was just an opinion from my own personal experience. I would hope that anyone asking questions on any forum would follow up with their own research, and not take one's opinion/advise as gospel, until spending some time researching other opinions. You've probably heard the old saying "You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts". Every time in the past 10 to 15 years I've personally googled/researched this question, I found pro's and con's to be around 50% for and 50% against, with that said, who do we believe? Sometimes we have to go with one side, I chose the "against" side and it's worked great for me, especially regarding the ssd drives. If I were doing some major opening and closing of programs that hog a lot of memory on my PC, I would put the paging file on another drive. Next time I get involved in a questionable thread on here, I will make sure I put from my own personal experience, but please do your own research, because your experience may differ.


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## ShrimpBrime (Nov 26, 2022)

Mr Bill said:


> I agree, but my intention was just an opinion from my own personal experience. I would hope that anyone asking questions on any forum would follow up with their own research, and not take one's opinion/advise as gospel, until spending some time researching other opinions. You've probably heard the old saying "You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts". Every time in the past 10 to 15 years I've personally googled/researched this question, I found pro's and con's to be around 50% for and 50% against, with that said, who do we believe? Sometimes we have to go with one side, I chose the "against" side and it's worked great for me, especially regarding the ssd drives. If I were doing some major opening and closing of programs that hog a lot of memory on my PC, I would put the paging file on another drive. Next time I get involved in a questionable thread on here, I will make sure I put from my own personal experience, but please do your own research, because your experience may differ.


Every thread can be skewed at this forum, simply that you are not exactly entitled to your opinion, because it's not a fact. 

Which is only a 50% bull blank statement and would only pertain if you make claim as it a fact. 

Well your opinion is actually fact, because you make practice with the experience. And simply share it with others.

But so far, I couldn't get a screen shot of anyone with a pc that would be in this site that could produce page file usage in the described manor of actually loading up past the memory availability, pushing system memory to page file and share THAT experience.

None. Zip. Nadda. Zero shared page file usage experiences. Not a one.


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## Mr Bill (Nov 26, 2022)

ShrimpBrime said:


> Every thread can be skewed at this forum, simply that you are not exactly entitled to your opinion, because it's not a fact.
> 
> Which is only a 50% bull blank statement and would only pertain if you make claim as it a fact.
> 
> ...


Yeah, I did a little googling, this was about the best opinion or fact "you choose" I could find.

"This old chestnut crops up again and again, and you get a variety of responses, but none of the really get to the root of the issue.

Historically pagefiles were used to cope with programs needing more RAM that pc had installed, and most of the advice was to reserve (say) 1.5 x disk space than RAM.

However, in time, RAM has become much cheaper, so the dependence on pagefiling is less critical BUT it really depends on what user is doing e.g. some activities are very RAM hungry e.g. rendering large videos, or running huge database type applications, having lots of tabs, apps open etc.

The other factor is that now Windows 10/11 uses compressed memory to minimise diskpaging, offloading compressed memory if that physical RAM is needed.

The relaptionship between compressed memory and pagefiling is a dynamic one and so best managed by OS.


Also, people cite other chestnuts about reducing wear and tear on SSDs.

Again, perhaps some truth back in days of 1st Gen 64GB SSDs, but now most new ones are 512MB plus with much more wear and tear resilience, and the pagefile impact on wear is less significant to point of being almost irrelevant now.

So, there really is no serious driver to set pagefiles manually these days.

Ask yourself if you think you know better than the OS in setting pagefile size manually?

The crux of most peoples arguments is I have plenty of RAM, thus pagefiles are not relevant.

Of course, this is true EXCEPT for when it isn't!

In the end, its a bit like having a modern DSG automatic car vs a manual gearbox. Many claim you will get better 0-60 acceleration performance with a manual rather than a DSG. This may be true of the driver is a professional racing driver but for mere mortals, DSG acceleration will easily out perform manual acceleration operation anyday".


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## Bill_Bright (Nov 26, 2022)

Mr Bill said:


> Historically pagefiles were used to cope with programs needing more RAM that pc had installed, and most of the advice was to reserve (say) 1.5 x disk space than RAM.


Ummm, I am going to assume you meant to say, most of the advice was to set the size at "1.5 x RAM". Not disk space. But I quickly add, that advice was arbitrary back then, and most likely bad, or at least not good, now. And more importantly, W10 and W11 are NOT Win3.0, W95/98 or WinXP. People need to stop treating them like they are.

And it was (and is) not just about programs want more RAM, but the OS too. 



Mr Bill said:


> BUT it really depends on what user is doing


This is VERY TRUE! However, how many users do the exact same task, over and over again, day in and day out, week after week, year after year? Any one? Probably not. This means the demands we put on our systems are constantly changing. We see this in the widely varying demands on our PSUs, CPUs, cooling and memory. My point? The page file size is NOT a set and forget setting. It is why Microsoft wisely made it dynamic - and never automatically disables it, even though it could easily be coded to "IF" it was better to do so.



Mr Bill said:


> Ask yourself if you think you know better than the OS in setting pagefile size manually?


??? Have you asked yourself this question? And not just of the OS, but do you (speaking to the crowd) know better than the *"teams"* of PhDs, computer scientists and engineers, and programmers who code the OS? Why do I emphasize *"teams"*? To point out it is not just one nerdy computer programmer making these decisions. But large groups of bone fide experts combing over exabytes of empirical data, peer reviews, study panels, etc. 

You make some great arguments for just leaving the defaults alone! But then you change them yourself - while admitting you are not a memory management expert. Ask yourself, does that really make sense?



Mr Bill said:


> The other factor is that now Windows 10/11 uses compressed memory to minimise diskpaging, offloading compressed memory if that physical RAM is needed.


Nope! That is NOT a factor here. The fact W10 and W11 use memory compression (because it is faster than paging to a disk, even a fast SSD) does NOT negate the advantages to having a PF too. Memory compression is NOT a replacement or substitute for a PF. Memory compression is an additional tool. Memory compression and the PF are complementary features that work together to help improve performance. 

And while Windows can run without a PF if you have a large amount of RAM, that does NOT, in any way, suggest it is better to disabling it when there is a large amount of RAM.

For those unfamiliar, here is a good explanation of memory compression. I invite folks to read it, then follow the How-To Geek's link to his related article, What Is the Windows Page File, and Should You Disable It? and note where he reports (my *bold underline* added),



> *Myth: Disabling the Page File Improves Performance*
> 
> Some people will tell you that you should disable the page file to speed up your computer. The thinking goes like this: the page file is slower than RAM, and if you have enough RAM, Windows will use the page file when it should be using RAM, slowing down your computer.
> 
> ...





Mr Bill said:


> The crux of most peoples arguments is I have plenty of RAM, thus pagefiles are not relevant.
> 
> Of course, this is true EXCEPT for when it isn't!


Therein lies the problem. This of course, is NOT true, except for when it is. For the vast majority of us, there is no advantage to disabling the PF, regardless how much RAM we have installed.



Mr Bill said:


> I agree, but my intention was just an opinion from my own personal experience


And that would be fine, had you expressed your opinion as an opinion. Instead, you expressed it as a statement of fact.  If this were a newspaper op-ed column, that would be fine too. But this is a technical support forum. We, as advisers, need to be technically correct - especially when making statements that imply, or suggest something not true or correct.


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## Mr Bill (Nov 26, 2022)

Mr Bill said:


> Yeah, I did a little googling, this was about the best opinion or fact "you choose" I could find.
> 
> "This old chestnut crops up again and again, and you get a variety of responses, but none of the really get to the root of the issue.
> 
> ...


Bill, just to clarify, all this in red is something I found and copied and pasted, none of this was my opinion or facts, I'm not smart enough or maybe dumb enough to even begin to argue page file pro's or con's. Again for all the forgiving folks here, I'm sorry I even got involved in this decades old argument, I'm sure no one here has ever went against the grain of someone elses opinion on TPU, I probably have a patent on that.


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## ShrimpBrime (Nov 26, 2022)

Mr Bill said:


> Yeah, I did a little googling, this was about the best opinion or fact "you choose" I could find.
> 
> "This old chestnut crops up again and again, and you get a variety of responses, but none of the really get to the root of the issue.
> 
> ...


Well, before you do the back and forth with BB, which he knows his stuff, there's no denying it.....

In testing/practice, I have found page file to be allocated. In my personal experience, not actually being utilized. At least, not on a measurable level.

So at some point, I am going to load up my system memory and see if a 980pro can act like system memory and get a wonderful experience from it, but I think this might be a misconception. The page file is there to prevent data loss when all system memory is used.

Also, maybe some small read or writes through commit charge, but would have to be less than 1% of available storage allocated. Because it's not measured that I'm aware of, at least not measured within the allocated space.


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## ThrashZone (Nov 26, 2022)

ShrimpBrime said:


> *Well, before you do the back and forth with BB*,
> 
> Also, maybe some small read or writes through commit charge, but would have to be less than 1% of available storage allocated. Because it's not measured that I'm aware of, at least not measured within the allocated space.


Hi,
To late for that 

Not sure what the almighty mad ducks argument against disabling page file is really, beside another pointless argument of who's correct or not seems a tad off topic for sammy magician issue at hand 

Many people disable page file even myself at one time think all my benchmark installs I do disable it and system protection as well 
All installs I disable hibernation to so unless one has an issue, the argument against is pretty lame imho


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## ShrimpBrime (Nov 26, 2022)

ThrashZone said:


> Hi,
> To late for that
> 
> Not sure what the almighty mad ducks argument against disabling page file is really, beside another pointless argument of who's correct or not seems a tad off topic for sammy magician issue at hand
> ...


Bill Bright is just making sure we don't share misinformation.

And he has every right to do so, and he's been factual about it too. 

The reality of allocating drive space for swap file is an industry standard when the OS is installed. So the recommendation is to just leave it alone and let windows manage it. Which I agree with 100% for average users.


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## Bill_Bright (Nov 26, 2022)

Mr Bill said:


> I'm sorry I even got involved in this *decades old* argument


 And this, so much, is part of the problem. 

My 1970 Toyota Corolla did this, so I am modifying my 2022 Corolla so it won't do that.   

That's the crux of my point here, TZ. 

You are correct, however, in that it is way off the topic of Samsung Magician. So time to move on.


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## chrcoluk (Nov 27, 2022)

Bill_Bright said:


> I agree - or at least feel one would hope.
> 
> To be sure, I typically am one to recommend users use the drive maker's own diagnostics programs too (rather than 3rd party tools beyond chkdsk) when they encounter problems. I base that on the fact I would assume the maker is the most qualified. So we are on the same page with that philosophy; that is, the maker knows best.
> 
> ...


I can give the reasons I have used it.

LBA sector scan - easily done in linux, but windows doesnt have any software that I know off that does this, chkdsk /r only reads sectors that hold data, not all sectors.

Can run SMART self tests - dont know of any windows tools that let you do this, easy in linux though.  Also have not found a way to run self tests on nvme drives in linux, the only way I know of is via the samsung magician (and possibly other vendors) tools.

Check for firmware update.

I dont keep it running 24/7 in background though, its just used on demand when needed.


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## Bill_Bright (Nov 27, 2022)

chrcoluk said:


> chkdsk /r only reads sectors that hold data, not all sectors.


Huh? Not true at all and never was. Of course it reads all sectors, regardless if it currently holds data, or not.

Did you mean *chkdsk /f*? 

*chkdsk /r *certainly does scan the entire drive and will attempt to fix any errors it finds. chkdsk with the /r switch will also locate bad sectors and attempt to recover any data from those sectors. 

*chkdsk /f*, on the other hand, does not check each location. Since the /r switch implies (or includes) /f, I always recommend using the /r. If one enters chkdsk /f /r, the /f will be ignored.

This is simple to see for yourself. Get a brand new drive, or format an old and run chkdsk on it and watch the progress. On a blank drive, *chkdsk /f* will take seconds. But *chkdsk /r* will take minutes - even hours on a very large drive. Look for activity in Stage 5 of the progress. 

Your other reasons to have Samsung Magician available are fine - I never disagreed with them. 

I said, and you quoted me, I see no need to have it start and run in memory every time we start Windows. I stand by that.


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## chrcoluk (Nov 27, 2022)

when I last used chkdsk /r on a zeroed drive it finished extremely quickly, I can try it again though to see if its changed.


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## Bill_Bright (Nov 28, 2022)

It hasn't changed. If it finished extremely quickly, something was amiss. Either the wrong switch was used, the scan aborted for some reason, it was a tiny partition, a small drive, or maybe a SSD instead of HD. 

Either way, the error checking program has not changed in many years. Other than to add support for NTFS (in the mid 1980s), and add a few extra switches, it has remained basically the same for the last 40+ years! And this is because hard drive technologies have not changed. You have a R/W head that manipulates magnetic particles on platters (writes), then goes back and senses the orientation of those particles (reads). The rest is in the controller. 

BTW, while running chkdsk on a SSD, in theory, is fine, it is often not recommended. But, sadly, for the wrong reasons.   Some incorrectly claim it is harmful to SSDs. Simply not true - especially with current generation SSDs which do not suffer write limits of first generation SSDs. But to that, the vast majority of the chkdsk operation is reads, not writes anyway. And reads have no effect on SSD longevity. 

Yes, a few people reported problems booting after running chkdsk on a SSD. But we can easily see similar reports for HDs. The truth is, those are one-off exceptions likely caused by some outside force - like a power fluctuation during a critical stage in the checking, for example. 

The main reason not run chkdsk on SSDs is because it simply is not needed. This is because SSDs use advanced wear-leveling and controlling techniques that already include error checking functions.


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