- Jan 12, 2005
- 9,500
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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?
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?