What is the NCQ and it's meaning with respect to noise and/or performance.
I'm looking for a 160 Gb to 250 Gb hard drive that is pretty quiet...possibly 2 of them as I have onboard RAID I could be using.
Is Seagate still the way to go?
Seagate 160GB Barracuda 7200.7 Serial ATA w/ NCQ What's NCQ?
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NCQ appears to be something that takes advantage of hyper-threading techniques to better manage use of the hard drive when multiple tasks are undertaken.
I looked at some Storagereview benchmarks and the 160 Gig NCQ drive did jump up a fair amount on file server type benchmarks. In the end SCSI drives and larger hard drives won on the "sustained transfer" type benchmarks. On larger hard drives the higher density platters it probably the main reason.
Anyway, I'll probably buy a 200 Gig Seagate today.
I looked at some Storagereview benchmarks and the 160 Gig NCQ drive did jump up a fair amount on file server type benchmarks. In the end SCSI drives and larger hard drives won on the "sustained transfer" type benchmarks. On larger hard drives the higher density platters it probably the main reason.
Anyway, I'll probably buy a 200 Gig Seagate today.
Seagate SATA drives are still quiter than the new Maxtors, but they are noisier than the PATA Models.
On-board SATA RAID is very cheap and very effective (NF3 250 is anyway).
Most SATA controllers out there don't support NCQ yet, some drives do, but the performance loss/gain depends on what you are doing with the machine, most tests show a performance LOSS using NCQ unless the machine has a long QUE at which point it starts to be worth while, saying this they are early drivers on early hardware, it might be better in the future.
Andy
On-board SATA RAID is very cheap and very effective (NF3 250 is anyway).
Most SATA controllers out there don't support NCQ yet, some drives do, but the performance loss/gain depends on what you are doing with the machine, most tests show a performance LOSS using NCQ unless the machine has a long QUE at which point it starts to be worth while, saying this they are early drivers on early hardware, it might be better in the future.
Andy
I think you are correct, like anything related to hyperthreading and multitasking, if there is only 1 task or very few tasks the overhead of trying to manage the threading exceeds the benefits. When the list of things to queue or thread is longer then the overhead may be exceeded.andyb wrote:Seagate SATA drives are still quiter than the new Maxtors, but they are noisier than the PATA Models.
On-board SATA RAID is very cheap and very effective (NF3 250 is anyway).
Most SATA controllers out there don't support NCQ yet, some drives do, but the performance loss/gain depends on what you are doing with the machine, most tests show a performance LOSS using NCQ unless the machine has a long QUE at which point it starts to be worth while, saying this they are early drivers on early hardware, it might be better in the future.
Andy
If you take a look at the results on Storagereview it's quite easy to eyeball the trend. Things related to file serving or web serving use the NCQ well, and almost everything else shows similar or even worse results for NCQ.