Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

SEAGATE, INTEL, SILICON IMAGE DEMONSTRATE SATA NCQ

Seagate, Intel and Silicon Image demonstrated Serial ATA (SATA) Native Command Queuing (NCQ) technology, one of the most anticipated features of the Serial ATA interface. The companies created an integrated Serial ATA solution combining native SATA hard drives, host controller, and system software -- all of which are required to perform SATA command queuing. The system used Seagate's new 200-Gb Barracuda 7200.7 SATA hard drive and a Silicon Image SiI 3124 SATALink 4-port PCI-X Host Controller featuring full hardware support for NCQ. Until then, SATA NCQ technology had been demonstrated only as a development technology.

The demonstration compares Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 SATA hard drives running with NCQ to Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 parallel ATA (PATA) hard drives, and shows that SATA NCQ technology will thrust SATA storage into a new realm of power and flexibility, highly anticipated by system builders seeking the latest technology for a competitive edge. SATA NCQ significantly increases I/O performance in high-performance PCs and entry-level server systems, compared with systems using bridged SATA or PATA solutions with legacy tagged command queuing or with no command queuing. The benchmark was specially designed by Intel to throw an aggressive transactional workload at the SATA and PATA hard drives and measure the performance difference in this high I/O workload.

The benefits of SATA NCQ are described in joint technology paper by Intel and Seagate titled "Serial ATA Native Command Queuing: An Exciting New Performance Feature for Serial ATA," available at specials.seagate.com/ncqpaper/.

NCQ is a feature that can only be implemented on native Serial ATA hard drives like Seagate's. It enables a SATA hard drive to take a set of up to 32 outstanding commands and intelligently reorder them before reading or writing the data, improving performance of queued workloads by minimizing mechanical positioning latencies on the drive. Operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Linux are increasingly taking advantage of multi-threaded software or processor-based Hyper-Threading Technology. These features lead to workloads where multiple commands are outstanding to the drive at the same time. By utilizing NCQ, the hard drive's performance can increase significantly for these workloads.

SATA products with NCQ will provide a new advantage for the cost-sensitive entry-level server market in which SCSI's extremely high queue depth and feature rich command sets are not needed. High-performance PC workstations, fixed-content and near-line storage subsystems, low transactional servers running applications like Web hosting, IT collaboration, and network and print servers where cost-per-gigabyte is especially important can all benefit from SATA NCQ.

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 is the industry's first hard drive capable of supporting SATA NCQ. NCQ will be implemented on production Barracuda 7200.7 SATA hard drives when system architectures that support NCQ become more broadly available. Seagate is working closely with industry leaders to enable the adoption of system architectures that support NCQ by early next year. Seagate led industry efforts to develop SATA, was first to bring it to market, and maintains its unique advantage with the only native SATA technology that can take advantage of advanced SATA functions like NCQ.

The SiI 3124 is Silicon Image's most advanced SATA host controller to date for server and networked storage applications. It is also the first and only host controller that supports Frame Information Structure (FIS)-based switching for SATA port multipliers, which enables command execution and data transfer to multiple drives concurrently, providing outstanding performance improvements for demanding workloads. It is compliant with the SATA 1.0 specification and supports all SATA II extensions to the SATA 1.0 specification.

Intel and other chip and motherboard manufacturers support the technology and are working closely with Seagate to assure a steady supply of SATA drives and supporting hardware to their customers.