Question: I recently bought a Samsung 840 EVO 500 gb solid state drive for my laptop. There’s a feature (disabled by default) called RAPID (Real Time Acceleration Processing of I/O Data) Mode. From what I can tell, this mode will use more memory/RAM to facilitate better/faster read/write speeds. A white paper on this feature can be found here.
What is RAPID mode?
RAPID mode is paired exclusively with Samsung 840EVO SSDs and available as a feature of the accompanying Samsung ?SSDMagician Software Toolset (version 4.2 and later). When enabled, RAPIDmode is inserted as a filter driver in the Windows storage stack. Thedriver actively monitors all ?storage-related activity between andamong the operating system, user applications and the SSD. The RAPIDtechnology ?analyzes system traffic and leverages spare systemresources (DRAM and CPU) to deliver read acceleration throughintelligent caching of hot data and write optimization through tightcoordination with the SSD.
So is it really worth enabling this feature? I have 8 gb of installed memory on my laptop (max that I can install). Is it worth this trade off of using some memory to improve speeds?
Answer: RAPID mode gives fantastically high results for benchmarks, where the testsoftware just basically writes out data that it rereads later on.If the RAM cache is large enough, the test will only measure the RAM speed,rather than the disk speed.
For example, the Samsung 850 EVO 2TB Review article from August 2015 givestest results from three well-known products :
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ATTO
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Astonishing. Previous speeds were 559MB/s Read and 537MB/s Write, and ?with RAPID Mode enabled we re seeing a nearly unbelievable difference ?at 3555MB/s Read and 3723MB/s Write!
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Crystal Disk Mark
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More of the same here, as results here jump to an absurdly fast ?6321MB/s Read and 4239MB/s Write (up from 541 / 522 stock) in the ?Sequential test.
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AS SSD Benchmark
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Another massive jump, with Sequential Read and at 3602 MB/s and 2380 ?MB/s, respectively (up from 520MB/s Read and 500MB/s Write in stock ?mode. And look at the overall score increase, from 1091 jumping up to ?36568. Wow.
However, in everyday life we don’t always re-read the data we have just written,so the results are vastly different.
I have found several user testimonies :
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Windows 10 Forums – Samsung Magician, July 2015
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Only in the synthetic tests. There is some improvement in copying ?large files between two SSD drives. I used to do very high cue depths ?work at one time and enabling rapid definitely helped. Under normal ?use and gameplay, cannot see any difference. I can tell you this, it ?doesn’t hurt. Just one person’s opinion.
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It definitely does not help boot times. In fact the rapid service only ?loads during the boot process and at best, would create a minuscule ?delay in the boot process.
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Direct X & Samsung Magician, March 2015
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For benchmarking it appears good, but actually in real-world ?performance, just slows down your boot, adds another background ?process, and doesn’t speed up game performance or anything majorly ?useful. It’s a have, and personally I see little to no point in using ?it, other than to give a faked illusion of more performance (which ?happens to be more unstable as well on quite a few system, which is ?why they leave it disabled as default).
And the next remark :
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I had issues with the Samsung magician “Rapid Mode” on, i was not able ?to play any of the counter strike games. They started and after a few ?seconds they would froze. After turning off the rapid mode, all was ?good.
Conclusion
Under normal everyday use, allocating up to 25% of your RAM to RAPIDtakes this memory away from Windows (and the same for Linux).Windows & Linux incorporate very good memory caching which I believe willbetter (and safer) handle everyday use.Especially as they use this RAM for morepurposes than just as a disk buffer (programs, memory data etc.).
With RAPID, one also has higher chances of losing data when power is lostor when the computer crashes before a write has been completed and sent to the SSD, as RAM contents are then lost.
I would therefore not counsel using RAPID for normal computer usage.