How do I enable NCQ on a Maxtor Diamondmax 10 SATA drive?

[Phat_Larry]

Hi,

I have 2 hard drives in my PC one 80GB Samsung SATA II drive and one 160GB Maxtor Diamondmax 10 SATA I drive with NCQ support. When I check in device manager the Samsung drive has NCQ available and is enabled by default, the Maxtor drive has the option for NCQ grayed out.

Does anyone have any idea how to enable NCQ for this drive? My motherboard is a MSI K9N ultra which uses an Nforce 570 ultra chipset.

 

[rpstewart]

Normally if NCQ can be enabled the check box would be enabled as per your Samsung so I'm not sure why the Maxtor isn't. On the other hand you're not missing much with it being disabled. NCQ is designed to improve performance where there is a lot of concurrent I/O like multiple users accessing a file server. Normal desktop use doesn't tend to generate a lot of simultaneous I/O so NCQ doesn't really get a chance to help.