Native Command Queuing facts for kids
Native Command Queuing (NCQ) is a smart technology for SATA hard drives in computers. It helps your hard drive work faster and more efficiently. NCQ lets the hard drive decide the best order to handle tasks like reading or writing data.
This smart ordering helps the drive's reading arm move less. Less movement means better performance, especially when your computer is asking the hard drive to do many things at once. This is often helpful for powerful computers called servers. However, sometimes NCQ can cause a small delay, which might make some games or simple data transfers a tiny bit slower.
Before NCQ, there was an older system called Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ) for Parallel ATA (PATA) hard drives. That older system wasn't very popular because it used up too much of the computer's main processing power (CPU) and didn't make things much faster.
NCQ is different because the hard drive itself decides the best order for tasks. This is better because the drive knows exactly how it works best. It can even consider where the data is located on the spinning disks. Both NCQ and the older PATA TCQ can handle up to 31 tasks at once. A different system called SCSI TCQ can handle many more tasks.
For NCQ to work, both your computer's connection part (called the host bus adapter) and your hard drive must support it. You also need special software, called a device driver, installed on your computer. Many newer computer parts use something called Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI). This means your computer's main system (like Linux or Windows Vista) can often use a basic driver to turn on NCQ. However, older systems like Windows XP usually need a special driver from the computer part's maker.
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