Issues w/ nf4 & ncq?

[SNM]

I just saw some random post where somebody said that Nforce4 and NCQ don't get along too well; that data corruption is common; bla bla bla.

Any truth in this?

 

[ChicagoPCGuy]

Yes and no. Depends on your particular hardware combination and the driver set you are using. I have noticed that from the nForce4 driver kit 6.37 on, NCQ does work right with most setups. However, use a setup it does NOT like and you will be FUBAR. I am using the 6.53 driver set, with a Seagate 7200.8 on a EPoX 9nPA+ Ultra mobo and NCQ worked OK, but is slower than having NCQ disabled. Interesting, huh? The other thing is that Prime95 and my particular setup do not get along with NCQ. The harddisk will thrash for hours and never even get to Test2 in the torture test sequence. Disabled NCQ and everything went normally. I did not experience any corruption, however. NCQ also seemed to work OK with everything else, just not Prime95 too well. For safety and speed reasons, I just disabled NCQ. I doubt I will ever use it, since there is no tangible performance benefit in a desktop usage scenario anyway--it is a technology that is more server oriented and is designed to handle large random I/O loading better, and that would be it's only real advantage.