P5B Deluxe - how do you enable NCQ on SATA drives?

[gramboh]

Hi,

I'm trying to figure out how to ensure I have NCQ enabled on my 7200.10's with a P5B Deluxe (BIOS 1004). I have installed the Intel Matrix RAID manager and P965 chipset drivers in XP32 but when I go into device manager and select the SATA controller or the drives themselves, I see no option for NCQ.

I also don't see any option about what DMA mode the drives are in (this goes for my DVDRW as well). This seems odd as I remember seeing this options on my old board.

I have the Intel controller set to AHCI in the BIOS and the JMicron disabled. Do I need to change the Intel controller to RAID for NCQ to show up? Will doing this bork my Windows install?

Thanks

 

[phile]

Originally posted by: gramboh
Hi,

I'm trying to figure out how to ensure I have NCQ enabled on my 7200.10's with a P5B Deluxe (BIOS 1004). I have installed the Intel Matrix RAID manager and P965 chipset drivers in XP32 but when I go into device manager and select the SATA controller or the drives themselves, I see no option for NCQ.

I also don't see any option about what DMA mode the drives are in (this goes for my DVDRW as well). This seems odd as I remember seeing this options on my old board.

I have the Intel controller set to AHCI in the BIOS and the JMicron disabled. Do I need to change the Intel controller to RAID for NCQ to show up? Will doing this bork my Windows install?

Thanks

In order to enable NCQ on your SATA drives, you need to run them in either RAID or AHCI modes. If you already have the Intel Matrix Storage Manager driver installed, you can go ahead and set SATA as AHCI, in the BIOS. Once in windows, open the device manager and right-click on the drive. There should be an advanced option to enable NCQ.

-phil

 

[BadThad]

Make sure you pull off jumper on the Seagate 7200.10 drives to give them SATA 2 capability. By default, they're jumpered for 150 MB/sec operation.

 

[gramboh]

I've got the jumper off and the Intel controller set to AHCI in BIOS, when I click the drives in device manager I only see in policies 'Enable write caching on the disk' - is this NCQ? There is also optimize for quick removal/optimize for performance but they are grayed out.

Intel Matrix Storage Manager 6.2 says the drives support NCQ and that 'Current Serial ATA Transfer Mode' is 'Generation 2'.

Are you guys sure I don't have to set the Intel controller to RAID mode in BIOS? I don't want to try it without knowing as I'm worried it might screw something up. Also shouldn't device manager be showing what PIO/DMA mode my drives are in?

Thanks

 

[phile]

Raid requires an array of 2 or more HDDs, and would require wiping all the drives in the array. AHCI is precisely for those that wish to enable all native SATA functionality, without building a RAID array. Anyway, it sounds as if NCQ is automatically enabled when available.

-phil

 

[gramboh]

Thanks Phil,

I'm hoping someone with a similar config can confirm if NCQ is automatically enabled or if I need to install some other driver I'm not aware of. My HDTach bench looks pretty good (both drives):

Burst: 205.9MB (so SATA2 is on for sure)
Access time: 16.9m (seems high)
CPU: 2%
Avg read: 64.4MB/s