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Hard drives are getting smarter. PC World tests suggest that a new technology designed to make drives operate more intelligently improves performance when it's combined with a larger cache.

Today's hard drives retrieve information in the order the PC requests it, so read/write heads fly all over to gather scattered data. New Native Command Queuing technology allows the drive to manage multiple outstanding commands more efficiently.

Part of the latest Serial ATA specification, NCQ requires an NCQ-capable hard drive and either a motherboard or a PCI adapter card with NCQ support. We tested a preproduction version of Maxtor's NCQ-ready 300GB DiamondMax 10 hard drive with a 16MB cache ($259), using an NCQ-capable reference PCI card from Silicon Image.

We couldn't turn off the NCQ capabilities of the DiamondMax 10, so for comparison purposes we also tested Maxtor's next-closest drive--a shipping 250GB DiamondMax Plus 9 with half as much (8MB) cache ($200).

The DiamondMax 10 outperformed the DiamondMax Plus 9 across the board in our tests, but it's impossible to tell how much of the difference could be attributed to NCQ and how much to the DiamondMax 10's larger cache. For example, the DiamondMax 10 completed our Copy Files and Folders test in 74 seconds, or about 23 percent faster than the DiamondMax 9's 91 seconds. In other tests, gains ranged from virtually none (Adobe Premiere) to 32 percent (Copy Large File). See the chart for the complete results.

By the time you read this, NCQ drives should begin appearing in new PCs--at no extra cost to you. Otherwise, the performance gains alone probably don't justify the required upgrades. If you're shopping for a motherboard and hard drive, however, NCQ products are worth a look.