PC performance buffs have long measured hardware advances using a few simple metrics: Is it faster? Is it bigger? Does it have more blinky lights?

Okay, that last one may just be my personal metric. But the point is that technology has always been more complicated than that. Processors, graphics cards, memory--each one is more than just the sum of its speeds and feeds. And now there's a new technology that promises to make a hard drive's performance more than just a reflection of how fast it spins.

At Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (known as WinHEC) in early May Seagate demonstrated its newest serial ATA hard drive, which begins shipping to retailers in a few weeks. What's interesting about the new Barracuda 7200.7 isn't its spin speed, which is a standard 7200 rotations per minute. It's not the capacity, either--a fairly pedestrian 160GB. What's exceptional about this drive is that it includes a new technology called Native Command Queuing that effectively makes the drive smarter, allowing it to perform on par with notably pricier drives that spin much faster.

In its demo, Seagate showed its $150 Barracuda 7200.7 and Western Digital's $250 Raptor WD740GD (a 74GB, 10,000-rotations-per-minute drive) running an Intel I/O benchmark called IOMeter that measured the amount of time it took each drive to transfer a 4GB file. Seagate's 7200-rpm drive with NCQ won, proving brains can win over speed. (At PC World we haven't conducted our own tests yet, but I'm hoping we can benchmark the technology within the next few weeks.)

Hard Drives Get Smarter

Seagate's Barracuda 7200.7 is the first desktop hard drive to include the new NCQ technology, says Joni Clark, product marketing manager. The reason Seagate is the first out of the gate with the industry-standard technology is that it requires a native Serial ATA drive, and the Barracuda is such a drive. Most current desktop hard drives from Seagate's competitors are based on older parallel ATA drives that they transformed into Serial ATA using bridge technologies, Clark says. (Expect NCQ-equipped drives from other vendors in the near future.)

The NCQ technology, engineered by the Serial ATA II working group, basically gives the hard drive a bigger, more effective brain.

When a PC sends a command to a standard parallel or serial ATA hard drive, the drive spins up its platters and dispatches its read/write heads to retrieve the data necessary to complete the command. During normal operation, a PC sends lots of commands to a hard drive. Since the drive completes these commands in the order in which the PC sends them, its read/write heads have to zoom around the platters in a fairly haphazard way, seeking out data that resides all over the place. This takes time.

NCQ allows the drive to handle multiple outstanding commands at the same time (a feature that first appeared in SCSI 2-based drives a while back). Using an internal queue that can store up to 32 commands at once, the drive quickly reorganizes the commands so the read/write arms can go after the necessary data in a more efficient manner. The drive is even smart enough to react to new commands while it's on the way to grab a previously requested bit of data.

In addition, the technology lets the drive use direct memory access for drive-to-memory transfers that don't require the PC's intervention. Essentially the drive is smart enough to know the most efficient way to transfer the data it's gathered, minimizing wasted spins.

A bonus of all this efficiency: Seagate expects drives with NCQ to last longer than drives without it, because their moving parts simply move less day to day.

Finally, one of the best things about this technology upgrade: It's cheap. Seagate says at first it expects to charge roughly an extra $5 for its NCQ drive, but that premium won't last long because the drives themselves don't require extra hardware. In fact, it's basically a firmware upgrade.

A Few Catches

Before you rush out and buy Seagate's affordable new drive, however, there are a few things you should know.

Ain't that always the case?

First, you can't just plug the Barracuda 7200.7 into your existing Serial ATA motherboard or PCI-based Serial ATA expansion card. It'll still run, but you won't reap the benefits of the NCQ technology. To get that, you'll need one that includes NCQ compatibility, and Seagate says you can't download a firmware fix to bring current hardware up to speed. In other words, you'll have to buy a new PCI card, or a new motherboard based on upcoming chip sets that support the updated Serial ATA standard.

Second, not all software will take advantage of NCQ, at least not at first. Many programs only issue one command at a time, awaiting the drive's response before issuing another one, which pretty much nullifies the advantages of queuing. The good news, according to Seagate, is that it's fairly easy for software developers to tweak their products to move from synchronous to asynchronous command requests. Expect this to happen over time.

Third, multithreaded PCs will net the biggest gain from NCQ. In other words, computers running Intel's Pentium 4 processors with hyperthreading should see more of a boost than machines based on chips from Advanced Micro Devices. That's because P4 machines are more likely to have multiple apps making requests of the hard drive at the same time.

And finally, there's the little matter of bragging rights. Sure, at the end of the day what most PC enthusiasts want is the best performance they can get. But, you have to admit, a 10,000 rpm drive just, well, sounds cooler.

As in life, I guess sometimes you just have to decide what matters more when it comes to choosing a hard drive: being cool or being smart. Or maybe the smart move would be to wait for a 10,000-rpm drive with NCQ. Now that would be cool.

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