SATA II NCQ Question About Switching Drives

[derubermensch1]

I'm thinking about going micro atx but there are no nforce4 ultra uATX boards out now or for the foreseeable future. My current prospect is the ATI RS480, MSI has a board. I am also considering one of the new Maxtor DiamondMax 10 SATA hard drives for the system. Now, if I get this hard drive and this motherboard, the NCQ feature of the drive will not work, correct? If so, if I upgrade the MB a year from now to a chipset that supports NCQ, how will this affect my drive? Will I have to reformat in order to take advantage of this, or is this something that will just work when suddenly plugged into a board with a supporting chipset? Is there anyone out there who can attest to taking their NCQ supporting drive out of a non-NCQ supporting system and installing it in one that supports NCQ? Whew : ) Thanks!

 

[derubermensch1]

No one has any experience with this ie maybe switching a Seagate 7200.8 from an nforce3 to an nforce4 ultra board?

 

[Alex]

i havent tried this myself but i don't think you will have any problems. and even if you did, just back your stuff up, format, and restore the backup... most ppl have this aversion to formatting their systems, i dont ever go 6 months without formatting... 🙂

 

[Cheesetogo]

How exaclty do youy back it up, and do you use another hard drive to do that?

 

[Alex]

Originally posted by: Cheesetogo
How exaclty do youy back it up, and do you use another hard drive to do that?

yeah, i dont keep anything important on my c drive and if i do, i include the files in a batch script that i run once a week that backs up everything important from my c drive to my e drive. call me paranoid, but ive lost EVERYTHING one too many times and i really dont feel like starting my mp3 collection again from scratch, for instance 😛

 

[Bar81]

You'll be fine.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: franguinho

Originally posted by: Cheesetogo
How exaclty do youy back it up, and do you use another hard drive to do that?

yeah, i dont keep anything important on my c drive and if i do, i include the files in a batch script that i run once a week that backs up everything important from my c drive to my e drive. call me paranoid, but ive lost EVERYTHING one too many times and i really dont feel like starting my mp3 collection again from scratch, for instance 😛

That isn't a backup, it's a cold spare. 😛

Having to format every 6 months just means you probably don't know what you are doing. 😕

 

[VirtualLarry]

You shouldn't need to re-format to take advantage of NCQ on a HD, although if you switch mobos and end up switching chipsets/IDE controllers, then Windows' will likely get confused and complain, and you will probably have to do an over-top re-install of XP. But there's nothing inherent in the filesystem layout on the HD itself that would get affected by NCQ or not, that I am aware of. (For example, you don't need to re-format your HD, when switching between PIO mode and DMA/UDMA mode. Those only affect the interface transfer rates, much like NCQ.)

 

[derubermensch1]

Ah, that's close to what I was wondering. In other words, is NCQ just an operational bonus when the drive is seeking or does it actually affect the manner in which data is stored on the drive?

 

[obeseotron]

The file system used should be the same, I see no reason why you would have to reformat.