What Is Native Command Queuing (NCQ)?
The hard drive industry is fast paced. You need more than just your drive to be fast. It needs to be fast and intelligent. That's where native command queuing (NCQ) comes into play. A simple method of improving SATA hard drive performance is optimizing the order in which read and write commands are processed so that the drive can accept multiple commands simultaneously. This prevents the drive head from repeatedly moving to queue various read/write requests, thereby improving performance, which can make all the dissimilarity when trying to get that epic video online before your friend does! The replacement for tagged command queuing (TCQ), which is used to improve PATA performance, has been around for a long time. The newer NCQ or Native Command Queuing was first introduced in the 2.6 Linux kernel and has since been implemented in Windows and Mac OS X. NCQ was created because TCQ worked by tagging commands with a completion code before sending them to the drive. The OS would then have to wait until all of these tagged commands were returned before sending another order. This meant that the CPU was taxed to get little performance gains, so much that many disabled this feature on their systems. In a world where data is so important, ensuring it gets to the right place at the right time is essential. That's where NCQ comes in. NCQ stands for "Non-Concurrent Queuing," and it manages commands sent to a hard drive. When you send an order to your computer, your computer has to decide whether or not it can handle that request right away or if it needs to wait until it's done with whatever else is on its plate. If it's busy with something else, your request will have to wait for that request to be completed before proceeding with yours. That's latency! Using NCQ, your computer can prioritize requests from various devices and ensure that they're processed quickly and efficiently so that you don't have any issues with performance, like lag or slow boot times.
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