Digital Home Thoughts: PCWorld: "This Hard Drive Belongs in Mensa"

"Processors, graphics cards, memory--each one is more than just the sum of its speeds and feeds. And now there's a new technology that promises to make a hard drive's performance more than just a reflection of how fast it spins. At Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (known as WinHEC) in early May Seagate demonstrated its newest serial ATA hard drive, which begins shipping to retailers in a few weeks. What's interesting about the new Barracuda 7200.7 isn't its spin speed, which is a standard 7200 rotations per minute. It's not the capacity, either--a fairly pedestrian 160GB. What's exceptional about this drive is that it includes a new technology called Native Command Queuing that effectively makes the drive smarter, allowing it to perform on par with notably pricier drives that spin much faster.

In its demo, Seagate showed its $150 Barracuda 7200.7 and Western Digital's $250 Raptor WD740GD (a 74GB, 10,000-rotations-per-minute drive) running an Intel I/O benchmark called IOMeter that measured the amount of time it took each drive to transfer a 4GB file. Seagate's 7200-rpm drive with NCQ won, proving brains can win over speed."

This is definitely a hard drive technology to watch out for. The drive will connect to the PC over Serial ATA II. NCQ brings back the ability for the drive to handle multiple outstanding commands at the same time, something that was first seen in SCSI-2. The drive uses an internal queue to store upto 32 commands at once and reorganize them so the read/write arms can go after the necessary data in a more efficient manner. Excellent, can't wait, because the hard drive has always been the bottleneck in I/O based processes and it will be good to see an improvement in performance. I also wonder whether laptops will have better performance and battery life with different re-organizations of the same set of commands.