I have an Acer Helios Predator PH18-72 laptop that has Intel VMD enabled by default. I am running two Samsung 990 Pro ssd's and Magician cannot update their firmware due to an incompatibility error with VMD. I cannot disable it otherwise the drives are not seen.
Does Samsung ever plan to update Magician so it can update the firmware in this environment or do I need to start buying another brand of drives for my computers? I have no intention of taking my laptops apart anytime I need to update their firmware.
Samsung Magician will not run on my workstation so I have to boot linux from a USB stick in order to run the fumagician updater extracted from the Samsung firmware iso. The extracted files I use are located on one of the 990's in my computer which I mount as a directory in linux in order to access the files.
Do a Google search for "fumagician" and you'll find a series of articles and tutorials explaining how to extract and run fumagician.
Hello userp1uY39sNos The Firmware can be updated in two ways, 1. The Samsung Magician can be used for automatic firmware updates, if you are using a computer with all the compatible settings and drivers.
2. For users with special setups, unsupported OS and etc., Samsung provides the Firmware as an ISO file for download and we provide an installation guide as well. To access the firmware download and guide, please use the following link - https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/support/tools/
For your case, if you are using VMD drivers, you would use option 2. If you only want to use option 1, that's where you need to make changes to your computer, so that VMD driver is not used and instead the Microsoft standard driver is loaded by Windows.
Obviously, Samsung doesn't care about creating a patch for this issue. This wasn't an issue 8 months ago, Magician would work fine with VMD drivers and update fine but now you have to do it manually to get your firmware update. Will not be using Samsung SSDs again in the future. It just shows their lack of support for their drives why would I wanna do business with a company like that?
I ended up pulling the drives out using my old amd laptop to update their firmware. I will most definitely be looking for alternatives when I buy again.
VMD can be turned off unless you need it for something specific.
Otherwise, lots of companies like Dell and Lenovo have guides for download on their website on how to turn off VMD, its typically just a setting within your computers BIOS settings.
This is because the computer manufactures know that VMD is not needed in most cases, especially for normal users.
Understood, maybe for your computer setup, Windows unable to make the necessary changes,
But its always a good idea to check with your system manufacturer, as some manufacturers want you to do specific steps in order to turn off VMD correctly.
In most normal computers, you should be able to turn off VMD and windows will just restart a few times, then VMD should be OFF once your back in the windows OS.
