[NEWZ] Seagate Throwz Down The NCQ Gauntlet (kix WD's @ss)

[Corvair]

SEAGATE SHOWS SATA WITH NCQ CAN BEAT 10K SATA; SEAGATE NCQ SHIPS NEXT MONTH

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif.—04 May 2004— Seagate (NYSE:STX) today at WinHEC demonstrated in head-to-head tests using Intel's IOMeter benchmark that its Barracuda 7,200-rpm Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive with Native Command Queuing (NCQ) technology equals or exceeds the performance of the latest 10,000-rpm SATA hard drives on the market.

Today's demonstration shows the power of NCQ by comparing a Barracuda 7200.7 SATA hard drive with NCQ to a current-generation 74-Gbyte 10,000-rpm SATA drive. Using Intel's IOMeter benchmark, the test transfers a four gigabyte random read/write file to both drives at the same time to exercise the full 32 queue depth capability of NCQ. The Barracuda 7200.7 with NCQ shows equivalent or higher I/Os per second compared to the 10,000-rpm drive. Customers no longer need to sacrifice capacity for performance with Serial ATA and NCQ...

More hyperbole at:

http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/releases/article/0,1121,2102,00.html

 

[CougTek]

What SATA controller currently supports command queuing?

 

[Explorer]

What SATA controller currently supports command queuing?

The one that's on the hard drive.

 

[sechs]

Does this make a difference to the average (or even the above-average) user?

 

[Platform]

Does this make a difference to the average (or even the above-average) user?

The ages-old "Will SCSI Help Me?" argument applies here 100%.

Basically, are your applications and O/S multi-threading?

 

[sechs]

I'm guessing that the correct answer to my question is no.

 

[ddrueding]

I'm guessing that the correct answer to my question is no.

I'm guessing you'd be massively right.

Unless your que depth spends lots of time above 1, this will help 0%.

The better seek time on a raptor, however, helps..um...everything.

 

[Buck]

These new Seagate drives should be a nice complement to the SuperMicro 7033A-T and 5033C-T server lines.

 

[Buck]

So, a controller card that supports NCQ is required. How come they never used TCQ on the Raptor drive when doing the comparison?

 

[Bozo]

Apparently Maxtor beat them both. http://techreport.com/
has done a review on the new Intel chipsets and used a Maxtor for NCQ testing.
Looks like the SATA controller must also support NCQ

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Buck]

It is helpful for Maxtor and Seagate that the Intel hubs don't support TCQ.