NCQ on Intel Raid

WoZZeR

WoZZeR

WoZZeR

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Hope this isn't a faq, I searched the forum and found no mention so here goes:

How do you turn off NCQ on an Intel RAID Chipset ?

And, is it a good idea to turn it off ?

Ta.
 
I dont know how to turn it off on Intel but I have on my Nforce one, and it made about 15-20Mb/s difference. I think the NCQ gets a bit confused when its trying to arrange more than 1 disk. I also noticed that my CPU overhead dropped a lot as well when it was turned off, it works a treat on single disks though,
 
On or off won't make a lot of difference in a normal desktop environment. NCQ is designed for high concurrent I/O scenarios like servers and allows requests to be re-ordered into a more optimal order for seeking than the chronological order of requests.

I'm not familiar with the Intel drivers but for NVidia it's on the SATA controller property page in Device Manager, that's probably a good place to start.
 
arfur said:
I dont know how to turn it off on Intel but I have on my Nforce one, and it made about 15-20Mb/s difference. I think the NCQ gets a bit confused when its trying to arrange more than 1 disk. I also noticed that my CPU overhead dropped a lot as well when it was turned off, it works a treat on single disks though,
Click to expand...
Now that's interesting.... Might need to give that a go.
 
Originally Posted by rpstewart
I'm not familiar with the Intel drivers but for NVidia it's on the SATA controller property page in Device Manager, that's probably a good place to start.
Click to expand...

Well it's pretty well hidden, I've hunted around the settings on and off for a few days and blowed if I can find it. Definately not in device manager, nor the Intel Raid Manager.
 
Originally Posted by arfur
I dont know how to turn it off on Intel but I have on my Nforce one, and it made about 15-20Mb/s difference. I think the NCQ gets a bit confused when its trying to arrange more than 1 disk. I also noticed that my CPU overhead dropped a lot as well when it was turned off, it works a treat on single disks though,
Click to expand...

I do like a free performance boost, ta for that.
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Well turning off NCQ didn't do much for my RAID0 array, only another 5Mb/s. However it didn't half give my RAID5 array a kick up the backside, it went from an average read of about 180Mb/s to over 225Mb/s :D
 
Originally Posted by rpstewart
Well turning off NCQ didn't do much for my RAID0 array, only another 5Mb/s. However it didn't half give my RAID5 array a kick up the backside, it went from an average read of about 180Mb/s to over 225Mb/s :D
Click to expand...

Now that's a performance boost!

I've had a good rummidge through the Intel site and they have oodles of techie stuff about NCQ but now't about switching it off.

Intel are just soooo adorable.....
 
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