NCQ? What is it? Would it affect my next purchase?

J

jamezzz122

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jun 1, 2003
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Well I was planning on getting a high capacity SATA drive since my old WD IDE drive has 6-7 GB left out of 80. Anyways, I was looking at the WD 320GB SATA. Then after looking at reviews, the Maxtor Maxline 3 performs better because of it's 16MB cache. I then read someting about NCQ and wasn't sure what it was. Can anyone fill me in? My motherboard is an Abit IC7 and this would be my first SATA drive.

BTW, SATA in WinXP is "plug-n-play" like IDE right?
 
Ice Czar said:
Part 6 of:" As the Hard Disc Spins", Command Queuing

you can find part one here > http://www.lostcircuits.com/hdd/hdd2/

I highly recommend the whole series ;)
Click to expand...


I love that article... full of meat.

Jamezzz - the controller on your motherboard does not support NCQ though, so you wouldn't be able to use the NCQ feature on the drives. 865.875 chipsets have Intel ICH5 controllers on them. You would need at least a 915/925 to have an ICH6 - which DOES support NCQ. You could buy a PCI controller that supports it though, if you wanted.

And yes, SATA drives are plug and play in WinXP.
 
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