Why does anyone care about NCQ support?

[shira]

I continue to see messages asking whether this MB or that supports NCQ. Yet I've read at least two articles that demonstrated that NCQ actually hurts performance in a typical desktop environment.

NCQ is most valuable in an environment in which the hard drive is continually receiving multiple requests for reads/writes of data spread out over the platters. This usage profile would most likely be encountered in a multiple-user scenario (say, a server environment). But for users like us, performance is actually degraded (unless the NCQ function is disabled). So why the interest? Are there gaming scenarios in which NCQ would be valuable? What am I missing here?

 

[barkeley]

Good question. I read about the same opinion. I imagine people want something they are sold to work, no matter it's useful or not... it's a matter to see how manufacturers are reliable or not.

 

[TekDemon]

While NCQ might hurt your maximum performance or whatever, more importantly it prevents performance from dropping to unusable levels....regular SATA with multiple threads running goes right into the crapper in terms of speed...

Try this, rar 2 huge files, then try unraring them both at the same time to the same drive. Or even one rar being unrared to the drive the rar is stored on is going to kill any normal drive.

So it's not so much about boosting the performance ceiling as stopping the floor from dropping out =p

 

[shira]

Originally posted by: TekDemon
While NCQ might hurt your maximum performance or whatever, more importantly it prevents performance from dropping to unusable levels....regular SATA with multiple threads running goes right into the crapper in terms of speed...

Try this, rar 2 huge files, then try unraring them both at the same time to the same drive. Or even one rar being unrared to the drive the rar is stored on is going to kill any normal drive.

So it's not so much about boosting the performance ceiling as stopping the floor from dropping out =p

Demon,

That's very interesting! Do you know of any reviews that have actually carried out a test like this and compared performance with NCQ enabled/disabled?

Dumb question: If a MB supports NCQ, does that mean that non-NCQ HDs (pretty much every IDE/ATA HD other than the Maxtor Raptor and Seagate 7200.8 NCQ lines) will be able to use NCQ?

 

[Trente]

Originally posted by: shira
Dumb question: If a MB supports NCQ, does that mean that non-NCQ HDs (pretty much every IDE/ATA HD other than the Maxtor Raptor and Seagate 7200.8 NCQ lines) will be able to use NCQ?

No.

 

[mystere]

Another area where I see NCQ being important is when burning CD's or DVD's. I know that buffer underrun protection prevents a coaster from being made, but I don't like having it engaged because it creates a very subtle gap in the track. NCQ will help prevent a buffer underrun when you start up other apps or do heavy disk access like unraring on the same drive you are creating the CD from.

 

[shira]

Originally posted by: Trente

Originally posted by: shira
Dumb question: If a MB supports NCQ, does that mean that non-NCQ HDs (pretty much every IDE/ATA HD other than the Maxtor Raptor and Seagate 7200.8 NCQ lines) will be able to use NCQ?

No.

Related questions:

If the HD has NCQ but the MB doesn't, do you actually have usable NCQ?

If the answer to the first question is "no", and assuming that both the HD and MB support NCQ, will the two necessarily be compatible? I ask this because as far as I know there's no industry-standard implementation of Command Queuing (for example, Maxtor's TCQ is not the same as Seagate's NCQ). Thus, will you actually have usable NCQ if you pair an NF4 Ultra MB with either a Seagate NCQ or Maxtor TCQ HD? Or do you have to make sure that both the MB and HD are using the same implementation?

 

[sreams]

How about an article from Anand:

http://www.anandtech.com/stora...oc.aspx?i=2094&p=1

They conclude that NCQ increases performance.

-S

 

[Rock Hydra]

I believe that the Motherboard and the Hard Disk mus support NCQ for that specific function to be activated.

Also: I believe only specific Operating Systems support NCQ. (2000 and XP, correct me if I'm wrong someone. Don't wanna give out false info)

 

[shira]

Originally posted by: sreams
How about an article from Anand:

http://www.anandtech.com/stora...oc.aspx?i=2094&p=1

They conclude that NCQ increases performance.

-S

That review found exactly one benchmark in which NCQ noticeably improved performance, the Business Winstone 2004 multi-tasking test involving file copy + IE/Outlook. For all other tests, the net effect of NCQ was a small loss, gain, or no effect, all in the range +/- 2%. It's too bad Anandtech didn't create an additional test involving read/write-intensive operations such as I described in my original post.

 

[Weiman]

Is there anyway to enable NCQ without installing the POS nVidia IDE drivers? Motherboard is an A8N-SLI.

 

[sreams]

That review found exactly one benchmark in which NCQ noticeably improved performance, the Business Winstone 2004 multi-tasking test involving file copy + IE/Outlook. For all other tests, the net effect of NCQ was a small loss, gain, or no effect, all in the range +/- 2%.

You might want to check once more... I find 3 benchmarks where the gain is greater than 5%.

From the article's conclusion:

"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. "

-S

 

[BigGreenMat]

For me SATAII with double the transfer speeds seems more important.

 

[sxr7171]

Originally posted by: BigGreenMat
For me SATAII with double the transfer speeds seems more important.

There isn't a drive around that can saturate a regular SATA I interface so what's the big deal of SATA II?

 

[imported_nitrus]

with hard drives its so hard to notice too much of a difference with such features anyway. i know ncq may not perform better in all situations and may perform worse in some others but i know it has a chance to increase drive life. besides if my mb and hd support it, then it better work. otherwise its my excuse to rma for a rev 2.0 motherboard. -wink-

 

[batmanuel]

One word: BitTorrent. If you are running multiple torrents, you are basically turning your desktop PC into a server that has mutliple users accessing the several different sectors of your hard drive at once. Even worse, since BitTorrent breaks apart files into lots of little pieces when you upload them to other people, you are not reading and writing those large files in a sequential manner. For a heavy BT user, it's easy to see where command queing could be a benefit.