My Mac Pro's WD Drive does NCQ, werid.

[kbonnel]

Ok, so I just noticed something weird when looking through my system profile. I was always under the impression that Western Digital Drives did not do NCQ. But when looking at my WD2500JS (standard drive for my Mac Pro), it indicates that Native Command Queuing is enabled. My other (and just added) WD2500KS drive shows that NCQ is not enabled. (The KS is the same as the JS, except of the 16MB cache vs 8mb cache)

Anybody else see this?

Kimo

 

[MovieCutter]

???

 

[Makosuke]

Well, I know the WD YS nearline series has NCQ, so it's quite possible that the KS series does too, although I wasn't under that impression.

Sure it's not just identifying that the SATA chipset on the Mac Pro supports NCQ (which would be cool for servers!), as opposed to that it's actually working on that drive? (Which, I might add, you probably wouldn't want in anything but a server environment--most benchmarks I've seen show NCQ as reducing performance slightly unless you're dealing with true server-style random access).

 

[kbonnel]

Well, I know the WD YS nearline series has NCQ, so it's quite possible that the KS series does too, although I wasn't under that impression.

Sure it's not just identifying that the SATA chipset on the Mac Pro supports NCQ (which would be cool for servers!), as opposed to that it's actually working on that drive? (Which, I might add, you probably wouldn't want in anything but a server environment--most benchmarks I've seen show NCQ as reducing performance slightly unless you're dealing with true server-style random access).

Thanks for the info. I wasn't aware that any WD drives had enabled NCQ. It looks like the JS has it, but not the KS. From all the reviews I have read, WD kept saying they didn't want to use NCQ as it could slow down single user performance. I am using my KS as my boot drive, and the JS as my data drive.

Kimo

 

[Makosuke]

From all the reviews I have read, WD kept saying they didn't want to use NCQ as it could slow down single user performance.

And they're right--it does with most firmware implementations. It's a tradeoff.

That said, even if that was their stance it makes perfect sense that the YS would use it, since those are their nearline/budget server drives targetet at a non-single-user market. Of course, that doesn't explain at all why the drive you have would have it enabled, since I was under the impression those were more targeted at enthusiasts than datacenter users, but maybe I'm mistaken.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

It shouldn't...

Well, the YS, YR, and KS support NCQ, according to Storage Review. The JD and KS don't. Unfortunately, they haven't reviewed the JS. (And Western Digital's website doesn't mention NCQ for 'consumer' drives.)