Force NCQ disabled??

[Aric]

I noticed that I have Forced NCQ disabled check on my drives.

 

Do I need this done?

 

All my drives are WD Red drives with one older WD green drive.

 

Thanks

 

[RobJ]

Long ago, and very contrary to the aims of the feature, we found that allowing NCQ produced poorer performance, turning it off could be significantly better.  It may be different now, with modern drives.  You are welcome to test.  Where it's supposed to make a difference is during multiple writes to the drive, multiple processes or stations trying to simultaneously write to different parts of the drive.  Let us know what you find, if you test this.

[Aric]

Thanks for the answer. I will try it. Most of my data is movies and tv shows so I am not sure it I would get any benefit anyways.

 

 

[almarma]

Hi!

 

While this post is old, I'm also interested in trying it out. Is there any risk involved if I try? Or is it just performance? I have many different kind of files, from movies to time machine backups (with a ton of small files), so NCQ seems to be useful to me, but the risk is high if I break something

 

UPDATE (3/11/2016): I couldn't wait, so I enabled it yesterday and restarted the server to try it . I've done a couple of fast tests, not very scientific, but here are the results:

 

- Test one: One single big file (ISO image, 3.6GB), unRAID -> PC: Fast as always, around 60-70MB/s.

- Test two: copying a Test folder with 595 files, 326MB, using FreeFileSync, so I can check the time and se a graphic about the performance: exactly the same, with or without NCQ.

 

The results of the test two where done without rebooting the server, as I didn't got any warning about it after applying the change. Is it necessary?