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Raptor Tagged Command Queing question

T

Top Nurse

Supreme [H]ardness
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Nov 4, 2003
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Does anyone know for sure if the newer WD Raptor 36Gb drives have the Tagged Command Queing (TCQ) feature built into it? I thought I had heard some scuttle butt about this a while back. Anyway I went out and bought 2 more raptors that are mfg dated of January 30, 2004. The WD tech support agent I spoke to thought that the newer 36Gb drives had both TCQ and better bearings that don't whine as much as my older drives.

Anyone know for sure?
 
I would think that if that was actually the case
WD would be crowing it from the rooftops :p
 
Hmmm.....

I think they did put it out to the performance crowd about 6-7 months ago. I guess I will have to go a searching :( to track it down.
 
*sigh* another case of RTFM....

http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/2879-001069.pdf

If you read the tech specs for the raptor series of drives, you would see..

Enterprise Class throughput- includes Western Digital's Ultra/150 Command Queing technology that optimizes the sequence of data transfers to the hard drive from the host, providing increased data transfer efficiency resulting in higher performance for enterprise applications. (74GB drive only).

TCQ is also a moot point because none of the onboard mobo controllers support it.....

See this thread regarding TCQ compliant HD's and controllers....

http://forums.2cpu.com/showthread.php?threadid=52632
 
NCQ requires controller support.

The Barracuda 7200.7 drives that feature command queuing use NCQ, and hopefully the people who have access to those drives have such controllers. In my understanding only native SATA drives can support NCQ, and the 7200.7 is the only native SATA drive on the market.

Firmware level simple command queuing does not require controller support at all.

This is almost certainly what Western Digital is using on the 740D (otherwise they would call it NCQ), and it is what IBM/Hitachi has used on their EIDE drives for some time.

WD largely avoids calling their command queuing NCQ per se, but instead "tagged command queuing" (all varieties of queuing use tags presumably) or "Ultra/150 Command Queuing Technology". Therefore since the Raptor is not a native SATA device, it's command queuing probably does not require controller support and probably has a much shorter queue depth than NCQ.
 
Just a little follow-up, SR has now put up an article regarding the different implementations of "TCQ".

As previously noted, the 74GB Raptor uses what SR calls "ATA-4" TCQ, not NCQ. SR believes that the 740's require support from the controller (since it's a SATA controller, not an EIDE one and hence may not support optimizations for EIDE firmware-level TCQ) for this function nonetheless.

This may very well be given their test results, and is something to watch out for. I suppose the issue will become nonexistant once WD gets off their collective fat asses and makes the next Raptor a truly native SATA solution that can therefore support the more ubiquitous (on SATA) NCQ.
 
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