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SATA Controller cards & NCQ

R

roncomatic

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 29, 2002
Messages
239
Hi,

I want to verify my research that there are not any widely available SATA controller cards available today that support NCQ. I'm interested in a higher end PCI card solution such as the 3ware 8006-2

Thanks
 
that is a correct assumption, how ever from what i've heard along rumour mills, sata was designed with that in mind and if you have a drive that supports it, a firmware upgrade should handle it for you. But totally rumour so it's kind of a crap shoot.
 
the way I'm dealing with this is just to buy the NCQ enabled drives and using them while I wait for the controller card to come out. The moment an NCQ enabled Raid 0+1 capable with 4 sata connectors comes out, I'm buying it. Until then, I'm buying the seagate 7200.8 ncq enabled drives.
 
3ware sent me a personal email saying they will get back to me within 24 hours. :D

And I'm going to spend $150 on a "real" (3ware hardware based) SATA controller so I want the info before I buy.
 
This is 3ware's response regarding NCQ:

"Please note that because command queuing is an intrinsic feature of
3ware RAID cards, there is no need to purchase NCQ hard drives.
I hope this helps you."
 
I've heard people talk about this many many times and I've never heard anyone or any company say that a controller card can do ncq for you. If that is the case though that would be great. I would love to hear more information on that, I might email or call them myself.
 
I also contacted 3Ware and the response I got was esensialy this.

The controller card only needs to support taggad command queing to take advantage of the NCQ on the drive. Native command queing only helps on the drive end because the card is already telling the drive what is wants. The NCQ on the drive just takes one step out of the translation proccess.
 
The controllers usually keep track of the queue, and simplify the requests. This is basically NCQ at one step higher. The controller has 128mb+ to dedicate to command storage, while the drive has at most 16mb. That's good. However, linux software raid dedicates the whole main ram and a much smarter algorithm to it. If you can completely dedicate a machine, you may find that faster.

Your choice.
 
The controllers out that I know of that support NCQ:

Silicon Image 3124
Highpoint 1820A
Intel ICH6

Those are the controllers we use to do our NCQ testing at work anyway. We don't have any 3Ware controllers, so I dont know about them. I don't believe that Promise has an NCQ solution out yet, but I could be wrong about that.
 
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