GamePC have thrown up their NCQ-enabled SATA hard drives comparison! Here's a snip.
Throughout 2004, we?ve seen Serial ATA technology finally move into the mainstream and wallop Ultra ATA/133 technology into the ground. While the transition to Serial ATA has gone fairly smoothly, due to SATA controllers being integrated on every new motherboard and manufacturers charging almost no price difference between SATA and PATA based hard drives, we have seen one major feature of Serial ATA largely overlooked until lately, Native Command Queuing.
Native Command Queuing, easily referred to as NCQ, can be thought of as a way to make a hard "smarter". A typical hard drive will simply read and write data based the order in which it receives them and will fill them out one by one. Native Command Queuing, on the other hand, allows the hard drive to keep a buffer (or queue) of commands, which the hard disk can dynamically re-order in order to keep disk seek times and latencies to a minimum. This allows for faster disk performance and less strain on the hard drive itself. From personal experience, NCQ enabled drives to perform visually faster compared to non-NCQ drives, especially when multi-tasking.
NCQ Drives Compared : Maxtor DM10 vs. Seagate 7200.8
Throughout 2004, we?ve seen Serial ATA technology finally move into the mainstream and wallop Ultra ATA/133 technology into the ground. While the transition to Serial ATA has gone fairly smoothly, due to SATA controllers being integrated on every new motherboard and manufacturers charging almost no price difference between SATA and PATA based hard drives, we have seen one major feature of Serial ATA largely overlooked until lately, Native Command Queuing.
Native Command Queuing, easily referred to as NCQ, can be thought of as a way to make a hard "smarter". A typical hard drive will simply read and write data based the order in which it receives them and will fill them out one by one. Native Command Queuing, on the other hand, allows the hard drive to keep a buffer (or queue) of commands, which the hard disk can dynamically re-order in order to keep disk seek times and latencies to a minimum. This allows for faster disk performance and less strain on the hard drive itself. From personal experience, NCQ enabled drives to perform visually faster compared to non-NCQ drives, especially when multi-tasking.
NCQ Drives Compared : Maxtor DM10 vs. Seagate 7200.8
