There's a PATA version of Maxtor's MaxLine Plus III hard drives, they say that it features NCQ. I thought that NCQ is a feature of SATA discs only, and even then it needs a special controller. So I wonder how it really is with NCQ on PATA - will it work indeed or is it just a catch? What about controller, BIOS, drivers?

I haven't followed HDDs lately (it's simple...I'm only interested in some info about some hardware if I'm planning to buy it soon), but if NCQ is basically making things "out of order" by hard dirve, so the heads will have to move less, than IBM had something like that few years ago already...

It was pretty standard for SCSI disks.

PATA drives can't use native command queueing, since it's only "native" to SATA. There is TCQ (tagged command queueing) which was basically borrowed from SCSI and hacked onto some PATA drives. Some SATA drives also support TCQ (I think the 74GB Raptor does), but NCQ, as you said, is SATA-only.

Strangely enough, TCQ and NCQ are completely incompatable. If you have a (SATA) drive that only uses TCQ and a controller that only uses NCQ, you won't be able to use either. That being said, I don't actually know what the difference between the two is, I only know that they are different.

Looking at the spec sheet for the MaxLine III, it lists NCQ in the "SATA II features" section. It's right above "Hot plug", which PATA has no chance of being able to do correctly. I'm positive NCQ is only for the SATA version.

Omion, but if you look at MaxLine III PATA reviews or specs in the shops, they list NCQ as a feature everywhere. Plus the fact that there's DiamondMax 10 PATA which is identical to MaxLine III PATA except that the latter is told to have NCQ. How would you explain that?

That's because the stores and reviews get their info from the spec sheet which says things like "NCQ! Hot plug! PATA or SATA!" without pointing out that not all combinations make sense.


From the reviews I find, the MaxLine III is identical to the DiamondMax 10 with the exception of a longer warrany and perhaps higher quality parts. I haven't seen anything indicating that the MaxLine III specifically adds NCQ to the PATA model.

The problem is that command queueing is confusing. Various sites say that NCQ is only needed to be supported in the drive (which I'm pretty sure is not the case). Others say that TCQ and NCQ are, in fact, interchangable, and only the name changed when SATA came out (I'm SURE this is not the case). This page seems to be pretty good at describing what everything is, and I haven't found any glaring discrepancies in it...

The best thing to do, of course, is ask Maxtor directly, so that's what I did! Here's my letter:
It's reference #050926-000192, although I have the feeling that only I can view it... I'll post the answer as soon as I get it.

I asked Maxtor too, will post here if they answer.

Just got a response:

Thanks for clearing this up Omion

FYI: in this thread several HA members warned against bad reliability of Maxtor drives.