The Serial ATA and SCSI cards were used in different PCI-X slots on different PCI-X busses.
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Windows XP Professional SP2 with DirectX 9.0c The horror!Īll tests were run three times, and their results were averaged, using the following test systems.Ĭorsair CM72SD512RLP-3200/S Registered PC3200 DDR SDRAM I’ve even thrown in a 10K-RPM SCSI drive into some of our tests to illustrate how Native and Tagged Command Queuing compare with SCSI’s command queuing.
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However, arbitrary labels have never stopped PC enthusiasts from running enterprise-class hardware in their desktop PCs, so they’re certainly not going to stop me. The Raptors are technically enterprise-class drives, while the 7,200-RPM the drives are desktop products, and marketing types don’t like see the two thrown in the ring together.
This should give us a good idea of where command queuing matters and where it doesn’t for each drive.įinally, I should preempt purists who will no doubt be perturbed that I’m testing 7,200-RPM desktop drives against 10K-RPM Raptors. To contrast NCQ and TCQ’s impact on performance, I tested the DiamondMax 10, 7200.7, and Raptor with command queuing enabled and disabled. NCQ is definitely the future of Serial ATA command queuing, but TCQ is certainly an alternative for now, albeit a considerably more exclusive one. Although the only drive that currently supports TCQ is Western Digital’s Raptor WD740GD, the drive is widely available and reasonably popular among enthusiasts. I elected to use Promise’s FastTrak TX4200 Serial ATA RAID card on our test platform because it supports both Native Command Queuing and Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ). Maxtor offers a five-year warranty on its higher end MaXLine “Enhanced-reliability” drives, though. Seagate covers all its desktop hard drives with a five-year warranty, which equals the design life of the DiamondMax 10. It’s unfortunate that the unwashed masses who are buying retail drive kits get shafted with a single-year warranty, though.Īlthough it’s nice to see bare drives getting a little extra warranty love, three years isn’t all that special. Perhaps Maxtor is only serving up extra warranty coverage for bare drives because it knows that those who buy bare drives are conditioned to expect better warranty coverage. It seems counter-intuitive that the retail drive kits would get less warranty coverage than bare drive equivalents, but there’s no reason for enthusiasts to buy more expensive retail kits, so I can’t complain. Units sold as bare drives are covered by a three-year warranty, but those sold in retail packaging only get a one-year pact. Maxtor’s warranty policy for DiamondMax drives is a little odd. Command queuing can improve performance in multi-user environments and with randomized access patterns, but it doesn’t do much for streaming transfers. NCQ minimizes the performance impact of a hard drive’s mechanical latencies by queuing I/O requests and intelligently executing them in a more optimal order. The DiamondMax 10’s most intriguing new feature is support for Native Command Queuing (NCQ). 250 and 300GB DiamondMax 10 drives come with 16MB of cache-twice what’s available with 80, 120, 160, and 200GB drives. The DiamondMax 10 does manage to pack an additional 20GB or storage per platter, though.Īdditional cache is one of the DiamondMax 10’s more notable features, but it’s limited to the largest drives.
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The drive’s seek time and rotational latency are a little faster than the Plus 9, but not by much.
Like its predecessor, the DiamondMax 10 has a 150MB/sec Serial ATA interface and spins at 7,200 RPM. Read on to see how command queuing affects the DiamondMax 10’s performance and how the DiamondMax 10 stacks up against the competition. Available in capacities up to 300GB, the DiamondMax 10 comes equipped with as much as 16MB of cache and the promise of improved performance. Maxtor’s first NCQ-enabled desktop drive is the DiamondMax 10. That’s not the sexiest sales pitch, but for PC enthusiasts, NCQ’s potential performance benefits are certainly tantalizing. NCQ intelligently re-orders I/O requests to minimize the performance penalty associated with a drive’s rotational latency. Thankfully, Native Command Queuing (NCQ) brings a little spice to the otherwise drab world of desktop hard drives. Hard drives occasionally get a spindle speed or cache size boost, but for the most part, they’re only treated to expanding storage capacity-not that more storage capacity is a bad thing it’s just not that exciting. L IKE IT OR NOT, the latest hard drive technologies aren’t nearly as flashy as those from the processor, graphics, or even chipset worlds.
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