I found I had to do these steps below, to install a Samsung EVO 850 500 GB SSD, as a
second hard drive with no O/S, in addition to my existing C: EVO840 SSD drive that has Windows 7 boot on it.
Its not immediately obvious !! You have to allow over provisioning for long life.
- If problems, call Samsung technical service at 800-726-7864. They were very good.-
At first I tried cloning my existing C boot drive to this new drive, since there was no option to just format it, in Samsung Magician or Data Migration programs. I used the Data Migration utility.
That worked and took an hour, but then I wanted to clean if off for use by data only, and not deal with removing the OS, so I just decided to start over.
1. Install the SSD onto a SATA-III (aka SATA-6G/s) channel on your motherboard, not a channel on an expansion card (slower). To get its full speed, 500 GB/s.
Boot the machine and be sure in your BIOS, that the boot drive is still your C: drive, by looking in the Boot tab section, and setting it back to C: if needed. I found that the my SATA-III disks don't appear in the BIOS' SATA channels Disks list, since it only shows the SATA-II channels, but that is no problem. I have an older 2010 Asus i7 Mboard. The C drive does show up in the Boot drives list.
2. Start Disk Management, under Computer Management, by typing into the Start bar address "disk manage" and pick the Disk format utility. Or burrow down from Control Panel/... its tough to find.
3. The Disk Mgr will detect your new non partitioned SSD, and ask you to make a MBR or GPT partition. I picked MBR, but the newer one may be better.
> SET THE PARTITION SIZE to 90% of the total disk size, to allow un-partitioned room for the OP section, over-provisioning, spare memory cells in case some fail over time. This is 419 GB for a " 500 GB" disk. (its actually a 466 GB size.)
[Apparently Samsung specs the disk size as 500,000,000,000 bytes exactly, so divide by 1024 3 times, to get the size in normal computer gigabytes as we use them. This gives 465.66 gibibyte GiB, see above.]
After a few secs, the partition can be formatted: Right-click on the partition block, not the disk name, and select Format. I used NTFS.
4. So now, reboot just in case, so the disk info and partitions are seen OK by all progs.
5. Run Samsung Magician. Pick the top menu (on the left menu bar), "Disk Drive".
The new drive should show up in the drop down list. You may have to Refresh the drives list with the circular button in the bottom middle, since the Magician doesnt refresh that often by itself. If the drive doesn't show up, I would check it in Disk Manager, maybe reformat it in there with 90% used only.
6. Go down to the Over Provisioning menu on the left. The drop down box may not show your new disk.
If the wait icon circle, next to the menu name on the left is rotating, wait for up to 5 minutes until it stops.
Then the drop down list should let you pick the new drive.
The usage bar for the drive should show about 10% or 46 GB used on the right side for the OP Over Prov section.
If you want less future wear protection, you can adjust the OP percentage here to any number like 5%, but they recommend reserving 10% of the disk mem (10% of 466 GB) for OverProv.
This OP menu seems to automatically use whatever un-partitioned space you have left at the end of your SSD, when you make a partition of say 419 GB in Disk Manager.
7. The disk is ready to use !
If problems, call Samsung technical service at 800-726-7864. They were very good.
8. I have to do a few more things: turn on AHCI in the BIOS, they say this will speed up my 2 drives ?
And update the BIOS on my old EVO840 drive.
Here is AHCI instructions:
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/global/html/support/faqs_01.html
[9. The serial number of the SSD is correct on the box, but its not right on the sales receipt from Frys, for some reason. This was 177$ but lists at 166$ Samsung, or $149 at NewEgg, a great deal. The smaller SSDs are not as good a deal. ]
Watch out for the Magician "SECURE ERASE" in the Secure Erase menu - Samsung customer service says NOT TO USE IT.
I used it about 3 times, and it put 0.38 TB write wear on my new disk, according to the Total Bytes Written, on the top menu of Magician. This is several months of normal use wear! I used the erase, since the Secure Erase menu said the disk is in a "Frozen State". But now that the disk is operating normally, I see from this menu, that it STILL thinks the disk is in a frozen state from time to time, so that's not a reliable warning to listen to.
These disks have lots of wear, so 0.38 TB wasted is not a big deal. They have about 10 years of normal use in them, per Toms Hardware ! My EVO 840 has 10.98 TB of use on it, and its going fine. After ? 2 years approx.