[yukon]

Does any mac SATA card support NativeCommandQueueing? It's a SCSI type technology, can improve performance up to 20%, and is in more than a couple drives already. I'm looking at the Tempo SATA PCI card, and I can't find any information anywhere on Macs and NCQ (xlr8yourmac has two articles mentioning it, saying he doesn't know if it's on the G5 or any mac cards).

[yukon]

That's it, next time I won't be Mr.Nice Guy and name my thread "I have a question...." or something.

I've talked to the producer(s) of the Sonnet and Firmtek cards, these cards don't support it, but there will be a card RSN. Seagate mistakenly said the firmtek card did and have been informed. Barefeats.com says no current Macintosh cards support NCQ as of July ISTR, xlr8yourmac is uncertain in the only two mentions of it on the site.

NCQ is part of the SATA II spec, being an "optional" addition to the original SATA spec. It represents the first major speed increase that SATA has to offer (otherwise it's just new cables and <5% increases in some benchmarks of special SATA native drives). It brings message queueing to ATA/IDE finally, limited to 37 or so queued instructions (SCSI is somewhere around 250), which is one of the major reasons SCSI does well in servers, making more than one drive instruction happen much faster than previously done. The Seagate 7200.7 supports it, as will the 7200.8, I believe a new Maxtor supports it, I don't follow WD's news.

That's all I know after a few emails and research. Best not to upgrade to SATA until the new controllers are out, even if you have the 136gb limited ATA100.