I recently purchased a Samsung 830 SSD drive to breath some new life into a Dell Dimension 8400 running Windows XP. On the bright side, the drive works great.  I cloned my existing C drive (the original Western Digital hard drive) using a USB-SATA adapter, plugged the new drive into the SATA port where the prior drive was plugged in, and everything ran fine.  I then installed the software which comes with the drive, known as Samsung Magician.  It promises to maintain the performance of the drive over time in light of the fact that Windows XP does not have any capabilities with regard to using TRIM or garbage collection.  Neither concept is one I fully understand, other than they seem to be important issues in the SSD world and without them the drive is doomed to get slower and slower.

Much to my surprise, the Samsung software indicates it cannot find the Samung 830 SSD, which it chooses to refer to as a "Promise 1+0 JBOD SCSI Disk Device." Maybe not a surprise, as that is how my Windows XP device manager sees it. (Actually, that is how Windows XP device manager sees the old Western Digital hard drive as well.)

I thought I could trick the software by moving the SSD to a USB port, but then Samsung Magician refuses to even acknowledge it as a drive of any kind. I called Samsung support. I was informed that Samsung Magician won't recognize any SSD drive using a RAID interface or on a USB port. My operating system does seem to think I am using a RAID interface for the drives, although in reality I have never set up any RAID system for my drives (the system originally shipped with only one drive, which makes RAID not a possibility anyway to my understanding.)

The system BIOS, on the other hand, can correctly identify the drive as a Samsung 830 SSD, and also admits that both the new and old drives are  both "Non-RAID disks." I can't even disable RAID on them in the BIOS, because it insists they are not RAID devices to begin with, so you can't turn off something which is not on to begin with apparently.

Is there any strategy for getting the Samsung software to recognize it's own drive? I tried third party software to see if it would work, Solid State Doctor, and Solid State Life. Neither can see the SSD as an SSD when it is hooked up to a SATA port.  Solid State Doctor will see the drive as an SSD when it is hooked up to a USB port, so the first light of any kind in this process. Not sure I can see trying to permanently run my operating system off a USB port though, or periodically removing the drive from inside the computer so that I can hook it up to a USB and manually issue TRIM commands to it.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.