Disable NCQ?

[omniphil]

Have an abit aw9d mobo (intel 975x chipset) and I'm using the HD controller in Raid mode in the bios. I can't see any way to disable the NCQ?

The HD has no ncq disable jumber, and as far as I can tell some folks can disable it in the driver if they are using an nvidia chipset on the mobo.

Any way to disable it on an Intel Chipset?

Why dont HD manufactures just install a jumper for this feature

 

[Bob Anderson]

Originally posted by: omniphil
Have an abit aw9d mobo (intel 975x chipset) and I'm using the HD controller in Raid mode in the bios. I can't see any way to disable the NCQ?

The HD has no ncq disable jumber, and as far as I can tell some folks can disable it in the driver if they are using an nvidia chipset on the mobo.

Any way to disable it on an Intel Chipset?

Why dont HD manufactures just install a jumper for this feature

Do you know if your hard drives support NCQ? If they don't then there is nothing to disable.

Does your Intel chipset support NCQ? If not there is nothing to disable.

NCQ is not configured in the BIOS. It is configured in device manager. IDE controller, properites, primary channel and secondary channel.

NCQ is not something controlled by a jumper on a hard drive.

-Bob

 

[omniphil]

It does support ncq, when i open up the intel matrix storage manager it shows the drive and ncq being enabled. Not that I can change it however.. Or at least I can't change it in Intel's storage manager software.

 

[Bob Anderson]

Originally posted by: omniphil
It does support ncq, when i open up the intel matrix storage manager it shows the drive and ncq being enabled. Not that I can change it however.. Or at least I can't change it in Intel's storage manager software.

NCQ cannot be disabled on a chipset, no matter what brand. It can only be enabled disabled in device manager. You have to dig through your IDE controllers to find the setting. It is the hard disk manufacturers who make the decision to allow it to be enabled disabled, not the chipset manufacturers. If you cannot find the setting under the IDE controller, then there is no way to disable it.

-Bob

 

[omniphil]

OK, sounds good, I'll look thru the device manager drivers and see what i got.

 

[Aluvus]

Why do you want to disable it?

 

[omniphil]

For performance, im not in a multi user environment, I want maximum read speed.

 

[fire400]

Originally posted by: Aluvus
Why do you want to disable it?

Originally posted by: omniphil
For performance, im not in a multi user environment, I want maximum read speed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Command_Queuing
This can reduce the amount of unnecessary going back-and-forth on the drive's heads, resulting in increased performance (and slightly decreased wear of the drive) for workloads where multiple simultaneous read/write requests are outstanding, most often occurring in server-type applications. However, the current technology actually slows down HD access in certain applications, like games and sequential reads, because of the added latency induced by NCQ logic.

OS_REWORK; Windows Vista fix:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/...-4800-8a0a-b18336565f5b/Priorityio.doc

-from the quotes, I highly doubt that even with NCQ turned off on a typical SATA300 drive on XP32/XP64/VISTA, at optimal settings, you will probably not notice very much in vice versa-real world software environments. However, be my guest.

Native Command Queuing is a technology that allows the hard drive to reorder dynamically its requests according to the location of the requests on a platter. It's like this - say you had to go to the grocery store and the drug store next to it, the mall and then back to the grocery store for something else. Doing it in that order would not make sense; you'd be wasting time and money. You would naturally re-order your errands to grocery store, grocery store, drug store and then the mall in order to improve efficiency. Native Command Queuing does just that for disk accesses.

For most desktop applications, NCQ isn't necessary. Desktop applications are mostly sequential in nature and exhibit a high degree of spatial locality. What this means is that most disk accesses for desktop systems occur around the same basic areas on a platter. Applications store all of their data around the same location on your disk as do games, so loading either one doesn't require many random accesses across the platter - reducing the need for NCQ. Instead, we see that most desktop applications benefit much more from higher platter densities (more data stored in the same physical area on a platter) and larger buffers to improve sequential read/write performance. This is the reason why Western Digital's 10,000 RPM Raptor can barely outperform the best 7200 RPM drives today.

Times are changing, however, and while a single desktop application may be sequential in nature, running two different desktop applications simultaneously changes the dynamics considerably. With Hyper Threading and multi-core processors being the things of the future, we can expect desktop hard disk access patterns to begin to slightly resemble those of servers - with more random accesses. It is with these true multitasking and multithreading environments that technologies such as NCQ can improve performance.
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2389&p=8

benchmarks:
http://mysite.verizon.net/res6pakd/ncq_desktop_performance_test.htm

p.s.
SATA150, Core2 1.86, x1900XT = plays any game upto date; 2007

 

[omniphil]

http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php

I looked at the gaming benchmarks there and saw that my drive did have higher scores without ncq, I figured it was free to disable ncq and I would rerun my local HD benchmark with it off to see if I got any gain.

Even if I get 1% gain, its still worth it to me if all it takes is disabling ncq.

It looks like I can't turn it off anyways due to my HD drivers not having that option, so its probably a wash anyways, just figured there might be a tiny bit of free performance hiding in the drive for gaming.

 

[Twsmit]

Originally posted by: omniphil
http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php

I looked at the gaming benchmarks there and saw that my drive did have higher scores without ncq, I figured it was free to disable ncq and I would rerun my local HD benchmark with it off to see if I got any gain.

Even if I get 1% gain, its still worth it to me if all it takes is disabling ncq.

It looks like I can't turn it off anyways due to my HD drivers not having that option, so its probably a wash anyways, just figured there might be a tiny bit of free performance hiding in the drive for gaming.

Check the SATA controller tab, not the HD driver tab.

 

[omniphil]

Originally posted by: Twsmit

Originally posted by: omniphil
http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php

I looked at the gaming benchmarks there and saw that my drive did have higher scores without ncq, I figured it was free to disable ncq and I would rerun my local HD benchmark with it off to see if I got any gain.

Even if I get 1% gain, its still worth it to me if all it takes is disabling ncq.

It looks like I can't turn it off anyways due to my HD drivers not having that option, so its probably a wash anyways, just figured there might be a tiny bit of free performance hiding in the drive for gaming.

Check the SATA controller tab, not the HD driver tab.

I'll double check that when I get home, but I'm pretty sure I went combing thru device manager before and didn't see anything...

 

[Tyhr]

The only way I know of to disable NCQ is to change your BIOS setting of "SATA" to be "IDE" instead of "AHCI" or "RAID". At least that's how it is in my Bad Axe 2.

You then lose NCQ and Hot Swapping.
Even though I read the benchmarks, etc, and am in a single user environment where I will be doing a lot of sequential read/writes (video edit/render), I went through a lot of trouble to enable AHCI (getting NCQ).

Although it seems absurd to me that in order to use a "newer" technology, you are forced to use the "obsolete" floppy diskette (F6 in install). I removed my floppy after the install - just seems too old. Why no option of CD/Flash/etc in XP? (not including custom made slipstreamed versions).

 

[omniphil]

Originally posted by: Tyhr
The only way I know of to disable NCQ is to change your BIOS setting of "SATA" to be "IDE" instead of "AHCI" or "RAID". At least that's how it is in my Bad Axe 2.

You then lose NCQ and Hot Swapping.
Even though I read the benchmarks, etc, and am in a single user environment where I will be doing a lot of sequential read/writes (video edit/render), I went through a lot of trouble to enable AHCI (getting NCQ).

Although it seems absurd to me that in order to use a "newer" technology, you are forced to use the "obsolete" floppy diskette (F6 in install). I removed my floppy after the install - just seems too old. Why no option of CD/Flash/etc in XP? (not including custom made slipstreamed versions).

I just went thru that same nonsense when moving my HD from the IDE setting in the Bios to the RAID setting. Why can't the F8 windows boot menu include an option to add drivers via a floppy/cdrom/flash?

I had to reformat and start over. silliness