I recently purchased Samsung 990 Evo Plus drive to increase storage capacity in a Dell laptop. I wanted to use Samsung Magician software to clone the original SSD, also Samsung. Should be simple, right? I should have plenty of knowledge and experience of doing this sort of work, or so I thought. After all I have been building my computers for more years than I care to count.
I had a simple plan - take out the original SSD from the laptop, place both SSDs into my desktop that has two empty NVMe slots, and clone the original SSD onto the new one. The original SSD was encrypted with Bitlocker so I decrypted it to avoid any surprises. Took a few hours to completely decrypt the drive but I was not in a hurry.
While waiting, I installed the Magician software on my PC and plugged in the new Evo SSD, of course after powering everything down and disconnecting the power cable. To my surprise when the Magician software started, it detected the new drive as counterfeit. I purchased this drive of Amazon from the Samsung storefront so I was not expecting this. After reading about how well made counterfeit drives are, I figured that it was bad luck and was ready to return the drive to Amazon. In the process I tested the Magician software with another Samsung SSD, 980 PRO that I had around. This time the software reported that the drive is genuine. So I decided to give the new Evo SSD another try but in a different slot. After plugging it again, the Magician software reported it as genuine as well. Well, that is one less return I had to do. What I don't really understand is why it was reported as counterfeit the first time? The software was reading the serial number and saying that the drive is not genuine. But the serial number was always the same. The Magician software was the latest version, just freshly installed.
Now to the cloning process. My original drive finished decrypting and I installed it into another slot. Powered up my PC and the software reported both drives as found and legitimate. I should be home free now...
Nop, I was wrong again. The software refused to clone the old Samsung SSD to the new one. It was saying "unsupported drive". The original drive is a Samsung SSD drive, probably made for Dell. The software had no problems accepting my WD drive as a source but not the Samsung drive.
After few attempts to figure it out, I gave up and simply downloaded Macrium Reflect FREE Edition. It was listed as a decent software in several online reviews. While the interface is not very intuitive and required instructions to get started, the over all process went without a hitch. I was able to clone the drive and resize partitions that needed resizing. It was a relatively painless process after I figured out how to get into the cloning mode. The new SSD booted right up when placed into the laptop and all things were as they should be.
So if you get a Samsung SSD, skip the Magician software and save yourself some aggravation. It is a bloated piece of garbage that tries to run on startup and generally provides no useful features. And it does not always work for the only purpose you may want to use it.
