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NCQ HDDs

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It's rather old news, but it is one of the newer technologies available for hard drives today. As in real-world performance, NCQ has been shown to have little or no improvement in speed. You are far better off purchasing a raptor if you are looking for a cheap solution for more speed.
 
If you have a large number of simultaneous I/Os the NCQ can pay off, otherwise it's not going to offer much. Command queuing started off in SCSI units many years ago as a method by which the drive and controller can work together to figure out the most efficient manner to service queued I/Os. This is a particularly useful feature in I/O heavy environments that tend towards non-contiguous access patterns - databases, multiuser fileservers, etc. If you're only interested in desktop work, loading video files, game maps, word docs, etc., it's not going to do much for you, as most of those tasks lean towards contiguous access patterns. The implementations of NCQ are also somewhat lacking at the moment, but then it was never meant to equal what is available with SCSI.
 
I was planning on using a new high performance drive as a multi user file server. I need a drive that will perform well when 2+ people are stripping files from it with ethernet (like patches or mods needed at a lan party).
 
E_tron said:
I was planning on using a new high performance drive as a multi user file server. I need a drive that will perform well when 2+ people are stripping files from it with ethernet (like patches or mods needed at a lan party).

2+ users is not that large of a load. Do you have an idea of the top end of the scale? Also, am I correct in assuming these are relatively large files?
 
i bought 2x300gb seagate 7200.8s. My mobo doesnt support NCQ now, but later when i have a dual core and im encoding a dvd, downloading, playing a game, and 10 other things it will help.
 
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