SATA II and Native Command Queuing?

[IceDigger]

How does the new sata drives with ncq compare to the old sata drives?

How do they compare to the older SATA Raptor drives?

What is ESATA?

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductdesc.asp?description=22-144-359&DEPA=0

I am thinking of purchasing 2 of those drives. Will my Abit AV8 3rd Eye support that drive?

[xonik]

I haven't found any benchmarks on Seagate's 7200.8, which features NCQ, but I assume that the drive is somewhat faster mostly because of internal optimizations besides NCQ.

Maxtor's DiamondMax 10 and MaXLine III families of drives are arguably the fastest 7200 RPM drives on the market, and they feature NCQ and Serial ATA II features, though again, I would find it fairly difficult to believe that either NCQ or SATA II has anything to do with that. Most likely, it's the additional cache and improved caching algorithms that we can thank for these performance advantages.

What is ESATA? I assume it's an abbreviation for external Serial ATA,

http://www.storagevisions.com/External%20SATA%20WP%208.pdf

[LoneWolf]

Your AV8 mainboard will support the drive, but will not support its NCQ features. Only chipset currently available AFAIK that supports NCQ on the Athlon 64 platform is NForce4 (VIA KT890 might, but I don't know). At any rate, data on how much good NCQ does is currently inconclusive; for nonsequential disk access it's faster, but for sequential access it can be the same to slightly slower.

I'm running two SATA2 NCQ drives (NCQ disabled) in my system. I bought them for the low noise, and fast performance, and I'm happy. No matter how fast a drive interface currently is (ATA/100, SATA, SATA2) they're all still limited by the limits of hard disk mechanical design; one isn't all that much faster than the other, and most speed differences currently come from head and controller design, or spindle speed in the case of the Raptors. Raptors will beat pretty much anything, but at the expense of noise, heat, and lesser capacity.

[bandit390]

Will a gigabyte nforce3 939, work with this drive?