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I have replaced my laptop's HDD with a Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250GB and installed Ubuntu 14.04. I know that the Samsung Magician software drastically improves SSD performance, but have not been able to find a way of installing it to Ubuntu. Has anyone been able to or know how to do this?

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Samsung Magician is a piece of windows software, and will not run under Ubuntu. There are several articles written about optimizing SSD performance in Linux and Ubuntu - your time may be better spent researching these. – Charles Green Oct 15 '14 at 18:51
    
@CharlesGreen, could you link some? – Blackbelt Nov 18 '14 at 10:59
    
A google search will find them quickly askubuntu.com/questions/1400/how-do-i-optimize-the-os-for-ss‌​ds howtogeek.com/62761/… webupd8.org/2013/01/enable-trim-on-ssd-solid-state-drives.ht‌​ml – Charles Green Nov 18 '14 at 13:56
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Installing Samsung Magican on Linux

There is something called samsung magician dc that you can install in linux. It can be downloaded from this link. This is the manual. Extract the tarball from the first link, and open the resulting folder. There will be two directories, 64-bit and 32 bit. Open the one corresponding to your operating system. The samsung magician executable is in this folder.

Using Samsung Magician On Linux

The usage of samsung magician is described in the manual. Also some information on how to use the software can be obtained from sudo ./magician --help. One thing to know is that you pretty much always have to run magician as superuser. For example to list the samsung disks attached to your system you would use the command
sudo ./magician -L There are many more operations desribed in the manual.

Installing firmware

The Samsung magician dc manual is vague on how to install firmware (specifically on how to lay out the directory containing the firmware). To see how to install firmware see this answer.

Perfomance update

The 840 evo has a performance update which (I think) is independent from firmware and cannot be done with samsung magician dc. I think this performance update was the original goal of your question, so I will address it. The performance update can be found here. I have not done this update, but the installation guide is there.

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Regarding the latest 840 EVO performance update, several sites cite Tech Report description that the restoration is built into the firmware, Heise (german) is very vague about it but adds that this is from Samsungs press office but no source provided. – LiveWireBT Apr 30 '15 at 8:51
    
The links in the first two sentences of this answer are broken. – Faheem Mitha Jun 10 '17 at 7:05
    
samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/download/tools.html - but it only works on data center ssd's. – Michael Cole Jul 18 '17 at 1:52
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Samsung (Disk) Magician is a firmware update tool to notify you about new firmware releases and installing them. The firmwares are also offered as ISO images on the Samsung website.

Complementary features to the core functionality:

  • Display S.M.A.R.T data and total bytes written
  • Run a non-comparable Samsung-specific benchmark
  • Run TRIM manually
  • Debatable Windows-specific "OS Optimization"
  • Customize Over Provisioning
  • Create media to execute Secure Erase
  • Setup RAPID Mode - a feature that may lead to data corruption or decrease in IOPS
  • Manage hardware encryption settings

To summarize: A bloated LCARS-like firmware updater with no secret sauce.

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