Multitasking with Native Command Queuing

INTELLIGENTLY REORDERING I/O REQUESTS in order to minimize the performance impact of a hard drive’s mechanical latency—otherwise known as command queuing—is unquestionably the right thing to do. However, though command queuing has long proven to be a valuable asset to SCSI drives faced with multi-user and enterprise-class workloads, the performance benefits of Native Command Queuing (NCQ) in desktop Serial ATA drives have been harder to illustrate. Unfortunately, most commonly used hard drive benchmarks don’t play to NCQ’s strengths, and those that do involve server-style workloads that are hardly indicative of desktop environments.

If you don’t know what NCQ is, this article is worth a look. Head over to Tech Report to see the in-depth view.