Ncq - Heard Of It?

canute24

Feb 24 2005, 05:24 PM

Has anyone heard about NCQ? It is a new type of technology incorporated into new drives which makes them smarter and hence increases the overall comp performance.

NCQ - stands for native command queing. What is does is that, the hard drive fitted with a microcontroller has a stack which stores all the commands during high load and then the one which has the highest priority or the one which is immediately required is executed first so that the no so important process wait. This is supposed to increase the performance of the computer significantly. The Maxtor Diamond Max9 with SATA (300MBps) have this technology. And I think Seagate also has started providing this technology with the Baracuda .8 (Dot 8) drives. I am not sure. If anyone is following hardware closely they might know about it.

Since I was busy for a few months now I couldn't keep track of it. If someone has any extra info please post it here.

Thank You.

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burgen

Feb 24 2005, 09:28 PM

QUOTE(canute24 @ Feb 24 2005, 12:24 PM)

I have seen Dell offering them on their high-end desktop models, but never had time to figure it out what exactly it does and how well it increases the performance. Are there any comparsions done with normal HD and NCQ HD on same computers to see what performance boost can be obtained? I would like to see some charts or figures, numbers.

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deadparrot

Feb 25 2005, 05:40 PM

sounds good. can it be applied to existing hard drives(like send them off to be upgraded)? cause ive got a 250gb western digital drive, that i want to record from my camcorder onto, but pinnacle studio says that the connection to the drive is too slow! does anyone know what i cna do?

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talbotda13

Feb 25 2005, 05:47 PM

I havent heard of it until i read this topic. haha. i guess i am slow at learing new technology

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dontmaimyourself

Feb 25 2005, 05:55 PM

o.k I'll come clean I didn't actually understand any of that but hey it does sound cool, I mean anything that can increase performance has too be good right its a shame tho, for me anyway because this sounds expensive, and well i'm gonna stop talking now but thanks for the info.

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MarcoN

Feb 25 2005, 07:46 PM

To me it sounds they copied a mechanism that was in SCSI drives called "Tagged Command Queueing" which basically did the same thing.

NCQ only works with Serial ATA, not Parallel ATA plus your controller must support it as well. Intel ICH6R (915 and 925X chipsets) supports it. People have reported problems with TCQ and the nForce4 chipset, so before you buy (or enable) make sure your controller works fine with it.

NCQ is still good news because
- everyone is moving to SATA II anyway
- NCQ works great with hyperthreading / multi-core CPUs (also a new trend).

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canute24

Feb 26 2005, 05:49 AM

No hard drive can be upgraded. If you want anything more buy a new one. It is good to discuss things like these here. I never knew about TCQ.

For those who want it in simple words here it is: It runs the more importnant tasks first ( the ones that need data immediately) thereby decreasing the time the processor has to stay idle. This increases the work done in some time, increasing performance.

And that's another thing you must have SATA. Doesn't come with PATA. But no one knows, like after everyone thought that Socket A was dead and no new platforms were not going to be released, they are still fighting over it.

About the hard drive being slow: Make sure you get the data for Pinnacle in the higher drives ( like prefer C over D and D over E ). The hard disk is faster at Track 0 and slows down at the end. Now imagine what will happen at the end of 250GB. Keep you hard drive defragmented before starting Pinnacle.

Hope I could help.

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Ralphie

Feb 26 2005, 07:18 AM

i have not heard of that before but it sounds interesting. maybe i will look it up for more detail sometime... maybe. ill probably forget

but from what you said, it sounds cool.

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Casanova

Feb 28 2005, 05:59 PM

Will this work with the old SATA 1 interface? Whats do you think whould be the price of a 80gig hard drive with this technology?

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canute24

Mar 1 2005, 03:41 AM

No, I don't think it works on the old drives. There are only two drives that I know that provide this technology: Maxtor on the new Diamond Max 9 and Seagate .8 (Dot Eight) drives. I don't know if it is commecially available. I read someone saying Dell gives them. Maybe you can find out more from dell websites.

I don't know what will be the price of it in US. The price might be higher that the usual drives. Sice it is a retaively new technology I don't even know whether you will find it in shops over there. My problem is that I can only help you with the details of the technology since I am exactly half way around the world.

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T100

Mar 5 2005, 10:33 AM

It is a technology to re-sequence your read and write command to the hard disk so that the hard disk reader will not have to search for bits and bits of information across the hard disk but would do it in a more organized way. To use this, you must have a high amount of cache, definitely 8 MB would be the minimum. However, the tests on several magazines have revealed that NCQ does not boost speed significantly. From a test I read, a WD 160GB hard disk without this technology outperforms a 160GB Seagate. Also, on 2.5 inch hard disk, Hitachi is faster then Seagate. So, I think we should wait and see.

The following passage is from wikipedia

---------------------------------------------------------------
Native command queueing is a technology designed to increase performance of SATA hard disks by allowing the disk firmware to internally optimise the order in which read and write commands are executed. This can result in increased performance for workloads where multiple simultaneous read/write requests are outstanding, which occurs most often in server-type applications. Normal desktop applications will show less benefit from NCQ, or potentially a performance drop in some cases due to added overhead.
For NCQ to be enabled, it must be supported and turned on in the SATA controller driver and in the hard drive itself. On some Intel chipset-based motherboards, this technology requires the enabling of the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) in the BIOS and for the installation of the Intel Application Accelerator software.
NCQ differs from some other forms of command queueing previously available on IDE and SATA in that the command reordering is done on the drive itself. This is most effective since the drive has the most knowledge of its perfomance characteristics and is able to take rotational position into account.

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canute24

Mar 5 2005, 06:22 AM

I recently saw a seagate ad on a magazine. Seagate's .7 drives offer NCQ now. I don't know if it is SATAII. That's all.

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canute24

Mar 1 2005, 09:02 AM

[quote=guangdian]It really sounds good & wish the hard disk getting more quiet.& quick.

[quote]
That's exactly what it does. I don't know about being quiet, but quick surely. Since it's rpm doesn't increase I don't think it will get noisier. It might be at the current noise level too. Who know? But what I want from hard disk is reliability and then the performance. It doesn't bother me much if it roars like a jet if I don't get to see the "Copying..." dialog box.

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Ncq - Heard Of It? - Hottest on hard drive tech

Ncq - Heard Of It? - Hottest on hard drive tech

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