NCQ - Is it really necessary?

[hashv2f16]

Most of us Seagate buyers have the choice of purchasing a brand new hard drive with or without NCQ.. Ignoring price altogether, is it a feature worth having?

 

[4745454b]

Its not a feature I'd pay extra for. (ie, if there is no difference in price, don't worry about getting a drive with NCQ.) First, look at any harddrive review. All the ones I've looked at showed programs with NCQ turned on run slower then with it off. Its a lot like AID0. You have to be using a program that makes HEAVY use of the harddrive to make it pay off. If all you do is surf the web, download things, and play video games, you don't need NCQ/AID0.

 

[elpresidente2075]

As I recall, NCQ was developed for use in server settings where SCSI is not being used. The reason for not SCSI is that it already had an implementation in place, whereas SATA did not. It was (I believe) developed to bring better performance to systems where there is nearly constant hard disk access, such as in a server setting. Otherwise, it makes no difference, especially if your SATA controller has it in the hardware.

Basically its a completely pointless feature for the desktop. If there's no difference in price, and there's no difference in feature sets (barring he NCQ) go ahead and get it, but if there's even a dollar difference, it may require some deeper thought as to whether or not to get it.

That said, I have a drive with NCQ and I don't see the differences. Its just much faster than my older ata133 drive that it works next to.

 

[Guest]

Anand's test

The MaXLine III performs just as well as any of the fastest desktop hard drives available today, but when used with an NCQ-enabling controller, the performance potential is improved tremendously. Although we could only show it in one of our three multitasking tests, NCQ can have some pretty serious performance implications for those users who are running a lot of applications simultaneously.

The benefits to drive-based command reordering are easy to see on paper, but the fact that we were able to reproduce those benefits in a real world benchmark speaks volumes for the technology. As usage patterns become increasingly multithreaded/multitasking oriented, the performance impact of NCQ will improve even further.

Kudos to Maxtor for including support for NCQ in their latest drive; if and when more manufacturers follow suit, it may be time to start reconsidering Intel's latest chipset platform. While Intel's latest chipsets don't offer any tangible performance benefits to current users, the NCQ support alone may be able to convince some to upgrade.

Intel chose wisely when partnering with Maxtor; the MaXLine III should have been a much larger part of their launch in order to soften the blow of an otherwise lackluster performing chipset.

They seam to be praising it a bit more then I remebered, I would look at the benchies first, liek they said above, usefull for highly multithreaded access to the HD

 

[SuperK86]

necessary? No. do you even know what it stands for?
Native Command Queuing.
Have you read of any of the disk access algorithms? Like the round robin and such?
Put in a very simple term, NCQ is a "smarter approach" to accessing the data on a platter.

so necessary? No, but it's a darned good idea to have it.

 

[Guest]

Was that really a reply to me?

 

[sithscout80]

Here's more benchmarks to show the gain in performance with NCQ.
Multitasking with Native Command Queuing