Should NCQ be a factor at all when buying an HDD in a home desktop environment?

[Participant]

I'm still struggling to decide between a Seagate 7200.10 and a WD AAKS (2 x 320Gb in RAID) and the only difference I can immediately see is that the AAKS doesn't support NCQ whereas the Seagate does. Obviously there's the noise issue also but I haven't managed to find much info about noise with the AAKS so that doesn't really come into it at the moment.

I have two questions:
- should NCQ be a factor in my immediate decision?
- are there any upcoming developments that may make NCQ an important feature?

Many thanks.

 

[Participant]

Hmm ok thanks for that.

In that case is there likely to be any change in this RAID / NCQ conflict in the future, or should I disregard NCQ entirely as a benefit for a 2 disk RAID environment, in your opinion?

Of course there's also the possibility that I may ditch RAID in the future, in which case would NCQ offer any benefits in Windows and games? What I'm thinking is that I want the AAKS being fast and quiet by all accounts, but don't want to discount myself from a potentially positive attribute by ignoring NCQ.