Native Command Queuing (NCQ)

Native Command Queuing (NCQ) is a technology designed to increase performance of SATAhard disks by allowing the individual hard disk to receive more than one I/O request at a time and decide which to complete first. Using detailed knowledge of its own seek times and rotational position, the drive can compute the best order to perform the operations. This can reduce the amount of unnecessary seeking (going back-and-forth) of the drive's heads, resulting in increased performance (and slightly decreased wear of the drive) for workloads where multiple simultaneous read/write requests are outstanding, most often occurring in server-type applications.