Does NCQ really matters that much?

[mitarbl]

Can somebody tell does NCQ realy speeds up transfer rate? What exactly does i t do? And do you now does WD 200GB SATA II has NCQ?

 

[xit2nowhere]

The only thing I've heard about NCQ is that it slows things down if enabled.

 

[Philippine Mango]

Originally posted by: xit2nowhere
The only thing I've heard about NCQ is that it slows things down if enabled.

It varies, that isn't entirely true.

OP: in an essence, NCQ is MOST useful when doing random accessing on a drive because of the way it queues up the requests from the HDD. It makes the drive access the data when reading randomly more efficiently.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2396
Read that.

 

[INM8]

Iv got NCQ enabled on my Raided Samsung P120's. Should i turn it off?

 

[imported_rod]

NCQ should make things faster. Although if you aren't accessing random files, and you have a decent amount of RAM and a defragmented HDD, it wont make a difference.

RoD

 

[foodfightr]

NCQ is most effective under one or both of these conditions...

1. You're running a server.
or
2. You're using a dual core processor.

Under almost every other scenario NCQ will slow down performance.