Is NCQ important in hard drives?

entropy

I saw this hard drive at new egg and it says, "Up to 20 percent performance improvement over previous SATA, 100 percent software compatible with existing PCs." What I'm wondering is, will this make any difference at all over a regular hard drive?

Missileman

First you would need a controller who's driver and firmware support NCQ. ICHR6 comes to mind.

Second - in a home system you wouldn't notice a difference having NCQ or not.

NCQ is only helpful where it was designed to be. On a server environment where multiple files are being accessed at the same time.

It might actually do something on a HT enabled machine and you were running something in the background that was accessing files while you were doing something else.

Basically NCQ for a home user is all marketing hype

Of course the SATA II will be an improvement when the controllers come out

Tex

I agree. I have uses for it on some of my scsi raid systems because they are servers running oracle databases at home here. But having it enabled has been proven to actually cause a slight performance hit for most of what a normal desktop user does. There is a common misconception that is prevalent on the web that confuses things by comparing benchmarks for servers with desktops and vice versa. Even when you reduce the load on benchmarks like iometer and reduce the que depth it still does not simulate the data access patterns usually generated by desktop users. That also why sata and ide drives get closer to scsi drives these days on some benchmarks as their firmware is highly optimized for sequential (desktop) data access patterns in regards to how they cache data etc.. scsi's tend to come with firmware more optimized by default for random access as would be seen in a multi-user server environment. The lower seek times of the scsi really shine when the heads have to start moving. The ide drives have a much higher access but their str is really amazing these days. the OS seems much snappier with a pair of scsi's because teh OS does not use a lot of stuff that require high str but uses a ton of little files making the heads move constantly.

I use a tool called scsi toolbox to actually tweak the scsi mode pages (tweak the scsi drives firmware) and thus change the way the scsi drives use their cache and other error related functions. It's a killer tool is you use scsi a lot If you have an extra 5 grand laying around and use scsi a lot I heavily recomend it. (grin)

tex

entropy

K, thanks guys!