Seagate NCQ Technology...

[Shyatic]

Was reading about this at PC World... what motherboards support it? I just bought the Chaintech and apparently my hard drive (160GB SATA Seagate) has this technology, so I'd like to know if I can actually use it or will have to wait until my next mobo to make use of it?

Thanks!

 

[sisooktom]

I think the catch with NCQ is that the OS/application has to support it, and I don't think any currently do. Mobo support is also required, I don't know if the 2nd gen chipsets support it or not.

 

[Shyatic]

Hrm... okay, who cares

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: sisooktom
I think the catch with NCQ is that the OS/application has to support it, and I don't think any currently do. Mobo support is also required, I don't know if the 2nd gen chipsets support it or not.

There are three components to a disk access: the disk, the controller, and the 'application' (which in most cases is actually the OS working on behalf of a running program). The disk and controller have to support NCQ. The OS just has to have a driver for the controller that supports NCQ, and then any time it's doing multiple asynchronous reads or writes, it should be used. So user-level applications (and even the OS itself, other than the drivers) don't necessarily need to know anything about it.

However, this is mostly useful for servers; since most applications are singlethreaded and don't use asynchronous I/O, it won't help you if you're just running Photoshop or a game.