NCQ

[fate0n3]

I was wanting to know some peoples thoughts on NCQ. I have seen several benchmarks that show that the Seagate 7200.10 do better with it disabled. Wondering if anyone has any experience with disabling it and running and what performance gains if any were seen. Thank you in advance.

 

[Uber_sven]

how do you disable NCQ ??

 

[choirbass]

the main benefit to having NCQ is it primarily improves performance in server type scenarios (similar to scsi usage)... it would make sense that having it disabled would improve desktop scenario performance though... ...how you go about disabling NCQ though, im not sure.

edit: just found this over google

Go into the device manager and select properties for the nvidia sata controllers. Disable NCQ, i.e., command queuing for the sata channels!

and, i guess thats how to disable it

 

[Sagekilla]

I believe you can disable this in the BIOS and sometimes through a jumper pin. I'm not completely sure though. Did you check the manual for it?

I think they typically disable NCQ on drives because of little benefits available for typical desktop systems.

 

[davmalu369]

Here's what Seagate's site says about NCQ
Seagate NCQ

"How do I enable NCQ?

Native Command Queuing is enabled at the firmware level of the hard drive and cannot be altered by the end user, which means you have support as long as all the other requirements are met. If all requirements are not met, NCQ will not be utilized."

 

[choirbass]

well... you cant physically enable NCQ on a drive that doesnt support it... but, its very much possible to disable and re enable NCQ through the controllers software in device manager... i just disabled CQ on my 36GB raptors... so, you can do that... ...but you cant force a feature on something that doesnt offer support for it.

 

[fate0n3]

Thank you guys for the quick response from all of you. And yes you can disable and re enable NCQ if your sata/raid controller supports. As choirbass stated that is the way to disable it. Thank you guys again for your quick response i was having mixed thoughts about how truly good NCQ was.

 

[Uber_sven]

yeah thanks for that info - i might try disable NCQ on my 7200.9 drive when i get a chance and then run some benchmarks to see if average read/write times change....will use the SiSoft benchmark tool.

will report results

 

[fate0n3]

That would be great i am going to do the same when i get a chance i just got the new 7200.10. I would really like to see how much better this so called "super .10" are. Would you all consider HD TACH a good HD benchmarking tool? Ok i just did several really quick HD Tach runs results were with the Quick Benchmark WITH NCQ - 247 WITHOUT NCQ-285 So there really is a difference and i ran the benchmark 3 times each way just to see around where the numbers would stand.

 

[choirbass]

yeah, its pretty good

 

[Uber_sven]

i turned off NCQ on my 7200.9 and it made no difference whatsoever on read speed (the only benchmark i ran) - stayed at about 68Mb/sec

 

[choirbass]

hmm... ...fate0N3 mentioned that there were several benchmarks that showed improvement with NCQ disabled [in a review]... ...he might know which they were so you could test then with those instead

 

[Uber_sven]

yeah i might have to run some other benchmarks to see if it affects other aspects of performance like seek time and write speed etc.

but really, read speed is all that i'm interested in.......damm i wish i could get BF2 to load faster !!!

i'm seriously thinking of buying two more 7200.9's and putting them in a RAID 0 array - hopefully with 3 X HDDs i will be able to achieve 150mb/sec read speed, which should boost my OS performance somewhat

 

[choirbass]

for all practical purposes, raid 0 wont give a substantial boost in game loading time performance, TBH.... in the line of a couple % improvement at the very most, but not substantial like youre wanting.

the first review place that comes to mind is anandtech, you should check there for raid 0 performance reviews on game loading times

 

[fate0n3]

Srry for the late response but here is one site from a good website. I used this one and i will look up a few more sites too for info for you. http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2690 This pretty much shows the difference between the 150 raptor with NCQ on and NCQ OFF. Hope this helps i will keep looking for the exact website that had the review with the 7200.10.

Ok i found the other one i found this one a little more informative.

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=raptor150raid&page=3

As they show on both the sites. Disabling NCQ does not make a drastic difference but there is a difference.

 

[Uber_sven]

yeah i think your right i found this article which deals specifically with the speed of 7200.9s and program load times

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2682&p=7