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NCQ and support

Z

Zeratul1320

n00b
Joined
Dec 16, 2002
Messages
61
I am thinking of getting a couple Seagate 160 gig NCQ SATA hard drives and setting them up in RAID 0 on my Asus A7N8X deluxe mobo. I was wondering if the mobo would support NCQ and if it doesn't, what controller might support it since I hear that the performance over non-NCQ is noticable. Are the seagate's the best ones for NCQ or are there others better in terms of price to performance to capacity?
 
currently only aware of the Silicon Image Sil3124,
and Intel ICH6 offering Native Command Queing
(925/Alderwood and 915/Grantsdale chipsets) the SI only on cards?

but then I havent looked recently
 
HPT RocketRaid 1820A also has NCQ support. I don't believe that they have a non-Raid card out that does yet. I'm trying to remember if Promise has one, but I don't believe so.

And yes, the 3124 is only on a HBA card. :)
 
without native support, is it really worth it to buy the drives, or just get two other high performance drives
 
I had not really looked at what native command queing really was but it does follow with what i thought. I am not doing anything super heavy-duty, but performance is performance so some help in heavy multi-tasking sessions would be, well, helpful (Monty Python reference there). If the benifit for basic every day game, typing, internet, video recording would be negligable then I will not spend the money on it. But if there is noticable improvement with general access times and such, then some extra money would not be that unjustified, granted myself and most other people do not really need many of the new bells and whistles anyways.

In short, I am no [H]ard-core video editor, but rather a regular user who grows impatient over time. If there is no really benifit than so be it, I can step up a notch in terms of capacity for price, but if there is something, then why the hell not. I acknowledge my ignorance in the subject and respect opinions of educated and experienced users.
 
well, that is the last article in a series
I highly recommend reading the whole series

youd see a benefit if you where multitasking on a single HDD
but real world impact is pretty subjective
basic video capture is going to be sequential
(or more acturately it should be, with a dedicated capture partition that has no fragmentation to vie with)
however realtime video editing is an area where both NCQ and RAID0 could pay off

Id say a good partitioning and possibly defragmenting strategy with multiple drives
can readily address your performance requirements if its basically capture
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=741512
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=817039

If true save your money or invest it in more raw horsepower for your performance space
which generally means a faster spindle speed and higher areal density
http://storagereview.com/comparison.html

I find it unlikely you actually need 320 GB of performance space
likely the vast majoriy of your "storage" space could be served by 5400rpm HDDs
(if you could actually find them :p ) thats a whole hell of alot of storage at risk in RAID0
most typical user data in here is media (music, video ect) and that requires only 33MB/s
but if load times for games is a big thing for you, well that is an area where RAID0 will show improvement (sequential read)

NCQ and SCSI Tagged Command Queing really come into their own in a multiuser environment, or heavy database access (often one and the same)
where the data being concurrently accessed is spread out all over hell and back
you can normally address that by where your putting that data in a single user environment
aps that require performance closer to the OD, stuff that requires concurrent access on seperate channels\HDDs
the objective it to avoid having to swing that arm through too many degrees of arc in the first place

read that series and youll start to peice together how various performance metrics might impact your individual useage, and you can develop strategies from there ;)
 
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