Samsung SSD software update you must install completely breaks on Windows 11 25H2, 24H2

The software update from Samsung for its Magician SSD app is critical and must-install, but it is broken and unusable on Windows 11 26H1, 25H2, 24H2.

It is fair to say that Samsung products haven't had the best time so far on some of the latest Windows 11 versions. The South Korean giant came under fire recently as it came to notice that its Connect app was messing with Windows 11 updates leading to the system drive (C:) becoming inaccessible. Microsoft later published a detailed guidance article that walks through the fixes.

Interestingly, in the first article I linked above, a related comment caught my attention. Posted by a forum member M. Murcek, who has been around on Neowin for a while, pointed out another crucial Samsung software, which has been broken on Windows 11 for the last several months.

They wrote: "Not what's being discussed in the article, but Samsung Magician has been broken in Canary builds for a while now," to which another one of our readers wotsit responded "I don’t do any Insider stuff but Magician never opens for me," confirming that this Samsung Magician bug they are talking about has been encountered by others too, and outside of Insider channel alpha/beta Windows testing as well.

After coming across these comments, I did some digging around to see if others outside of Neowin are also having to experience such problems, and, as expected, there were many threads with lots of views and upvotes from online users which suggested that yes, this is a fairly widespread problem that has so far not been reported by mainstream outlets.

The first such thread seems to have popped up back in December 2025 with Samsung Magician version 9.0.0 as it simply would not start on Windows 11. This failure to launch the Magician app seemingly coincides with the release of the native NVMe driver on Servers, so we wonder if anything happened there.

Here is a gist of all the issues users are reporting about the Magician app on Windows:

• Magician app not working/launching/starting
• Display scaling bug such that fonts/texts in the app are unreadable, illegible
• Speed and performance reduction
• SSDs not being recognized/seen
• Drive health status and monitoring reports missing

Interestingly, the Samsung Magician app version 9.0.0, which is causing the issues on Windows 11 25H2, 24H2, and 26H1, is supposed to be a crucial update for the software as it patched a high-severity privilege escalation flaw (CVE-2025-57836) that allowed attackers to hijack DLLs via its compromised app installer on Windows.

So, it seems users may have no choice but to update to this version of the app since it is a critical one. On the slightly brighter side, there is a new Magician update v9.0.1.950 available which was released earlier this week. The release notes simply says: "Improved the UI/UX to enhance user convenience.
Users can easily use various features with a more intuitive and streamlined screen."

Head over to Samsung's website here to download the app and let us know in the comments below if the new update has resolved your issues. Another positive news is that Microsoft is also working on the native NVMe feature in the background, so perhaps such problems may be addressed from Microsoft's end as well.

Source: Samsung forum (link1, link2, link3, link4, link5, link6, link7, link8)

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Posted Wednesday 1 April 2026 at 5:27 pm AEST (my time).

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