Seminar Report on Command Queuing

Table of Contents
Acknowledgement……………………………………………...1

Abstract………………………………………………………………2

Introduction………………………………………………………….4

Drive Basics…………………………………………………………5

SATA & PATA connections………………………………………..6

Problems in Data Transfer…………………………………………..7

Seek Latency Optimization………………………………………….8

Rotational Latencies…………………………………………………9

Tagged Command Queuing…………………………………………10

Native Command Queuing………………………………………….11

Detailed Description of NCQ……………………………………….12

How Applications Take Advantage of Queuing……………………16

Conclusion…………………………………………………………..17

References…………………………………………………………..18

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Introduction
Accessing media on mass storage devices, such as hard disc drives (HDD), can have
a negative impact on overall system performance. Unlike other purely electrical components in a
modern system, HDDs are still largely mechanical devices. Drives are hampered by the inertia
of their mechanical components which effectively limits the speed of media access and retrieval
of data. Mechanical performance can be physically improved only up to a certain point and these
performance improvements usually come at an increased cost of the mechanical components.
However, intelligent, internal management of the sequence of mechanical processes can greatly
improve the efficiency of the entire workflow. The operative words are intelligent and internal,
meaning that the drive itself has to assess the location of the target logical block addresses
(LBAs) and then make the appropriate decisions on the order that commands should be executed
in to achieve the highest performance. Native Command Queuing is a command protocol in
Serial ATA that allows multiple commands to be outstanding within a drive at the same time.
Drives that support NCQ have an internal queue where outstanding commands can be
dynamically rescheduled or re-ordered, along with the necessary tracking mechanisms for
outstanding and completed portions of the workload. NCQ also has a mechanism that allows the
host to issue additional commands to the drive while the drive is seeking for data for another
command. Operating systems such as Microsoft Windows* and Linux* are increasingly taking
advantage of multi-threaded software or processor-based Hyper-Threading Technology. These
features have a high potential to create workloads where multiple commands are outstanding to
the drive at the same time. By utilizing NCQ, the potential disk performance is increased
significantly for these workloads. But before NCQ, there was another technology , TCQ(Tagged
Command Queuing).It didn’t support DMA(Direct Memory Access).It was in PATA.

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Drive Basics
Hard drives are electromechanical devices, and therefore hybrids of electronics and mechanical
components. The mechanical portions of drives are subject to wear and tear and are also the
critical limiting factor for performance. To understand the mechanical limitations, a short
discussion of how data on is laid out on a drive may be helpful.

Figure 1, Different Parts of an HDD

Data is written to the drive in concentric circles, called tracks, starting from the outer diameter of
the bottom platter, disc 0, and the first read/write head, head 0. When one complete circle on one
side of the disc, track 0 on head 0, is complete the drive starts writing to the next head on the
other side of the disc, track 0 and head 1. When the track is complete on head 1 the drive starts
writing to the next head, track 0 and head 2, on the second disc. This process continues until the
last head on the last side of the final disc has completed the first track. The drive then will start
writing the second track, track 1, with head 0 and continues with the same process as it did when
writing track 0. This process results in a concentric circles whereas writing continues the data
moves closer and closer to the inner diameter of the discs. A particular track on all heads, or
sides of the discs, is collectively called a cylinder. Thus, data is laid out across the discs
sequentially in cylinders starting from the outer diameter of the drive.

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TYPES OF HDD Interfacing:

Mainly HDD Connection are of two types:

1.PATA(Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment)

2.SATA(Serial Advanced Technology Attachment)

COMPARATIVE IDEA ABOUT SATA & PATA HDD Connections

Parallel ATA (PATA) has been the industry standard for connecting hard drives and
other devices in computers for well over a decade. However, due to a few major limitations,
PATA could be a quickly dying breed with the introduction of Serial ATA (SATA). To compare,
PATA cables are limited to only 18 inches long, while SATA cables can be up to 1 meter in
length, which is less than 40 inches.

PATA cables are large and bulky and can easily restrict airflow. With the onslaught of better and
faster devices, computers continue to generate more heat and this can cause many problems
including complete computer failure. PATA cables are 40 wires wide and they block precious
space, which can restrict airflow greatly. SATA cables are only 7 pins wide. The change to serial
transfer is what allows the cable to be so thin, only two data channels are required, one for
sending and one for receiving data. Parallel cables use multiple wires for both sending and
receiving and this technology uses a total of 26 wires for data transfer.

Another comparison is that SATA devices require much less power than PATA. Chip core
voltages continue to decline and, because of this, PATA's 5-volt requirement is increasingly
difficult to meet. In contrast, SATA only requires 250 mV to effectively operate. SATA is also
hot-swappable meaning that devices can be added or removed while the computer is on (depends
on OS features to detect new hardware after hot-swap).

Fig. 2 Difference in size of PATA and SATA connectors.

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PATA Allows up to two devices to be connected to a single port using Master/Slave

communication. SATA offers an individual data channel for each device, using cables in a
point-to-point configuration. PATA having data transfer rate of 66 to 100 mbps but in case of
SATA ,transfer rate is 600 mbps and may be more.

PROBLEMS IN DATA TRANSFER

One of the major mechanical challenges is that applications rarely request data in the order that it
is written to the disc. Rather, applications tend to request data scattered throughout all portions
of the drive. The mechanical movement required to position the appropriate read/write head to
the right track in the right rotational position is non-trivial. The mechanical overheads that
affect drive performance most are seek latencies and rotational latencies. Both seek and
rotational latencies need to be addressed in a cohesive optimization algorithm.

The best known algorithm to minimize both seek and rotational latencies is called Rotational
Position Ordering. Rotational Position Ordering (or Sorting) allows the drive to select the order
of command execution at the media in a manner that minimizes access time to maximize
performance. Access time consists of both seek time to position the actuator and latency time to
wait for the data to rotate under the head. Both seek time and rotational latency time can be
several milliseconds in duration.

Earlier algorithms simply minimized seek distance to minimize seek time. However, a short
seek may result in a longer overall access time if the target location requires a significant

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rotational latency period to wait for the location to rotate under the head. Rotational Position
Ordering

considers the rotational position of the disk as well as the seek distance when considering the
order to execute commands. Commands are executed in an order that results in the shortest
overall access time, the combined seek and rotational latency time, to increase performance.

Tagged Command Queuing allows a drive to take advantage of Rotational Position Ordering to
optimally re-order commands to maximize performance.

Seek Latency Optimization

Seek latencies are caused by the time it takes the read/write head to position and settle over the
correct track containing the target Logical Block Addressing (LBA). To satisfy several
commands, the drive will need to access all target LBAs. Without queuing, the drive will have
to access the target LBAs in the order that the commands are issued. However, if all of the
commands are outstanding to the drive at the same time, the drive can satisfy the commands in
the optimal order. The optimal order to reduce seek latencies would be the order that minimizes
the amount of mechanical movement.

One rather simplistic analogy would be an elevator. If all stops were approached in the order in
which the buttons were pressed, the elevator would operate in a very inefficient manner and
waste an enormous amount of time going back and forth between the different target locations.
As trivial as it may sound, most of today’s hard drives in the desktop environment still operate
exactly in this fashion. Elevators have evolved to understand that re-ordering the targets will
result in a more economic and, by extension, faster mode of operation. With Serial ATA, not
only is re-ordering from a specific starting point possible but the re-ordering scheme is dynamic,
meaning that at any given time, additional commands can be added to the queue. These new
commands are either incorporated into an ongoing thread or postponed for the next series of
command execution, depending on how well they fit into the outstanding workload.

To translate this into HDD technology, reducing mechanical overhead in a drive can be
accomplished by accepting the queued commands (floor buttons pushed) and re-ordering them to
efficiently deliver the data the host is asking for. While the drive is executing one command, a
new command may enter the queue and be integrated in the outstanding workload. If the new
command happens to be the most mechanically efficient to process, it will then be next in line to
complete.

Keep in mind that re-ordering of pending commands based strictly on the ending location of the
heads over the logical block address (LBA) of the last completed command is not the most
efficient solution. Similar to an elevator that will not screech to a halt when a person pushes a
button for a floor just being passed, HDDs will use complex algorithms to determine the best
command to service next. Complexity involves possible head-switching, times to seek to

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different tracks and different modes of operation, for example, quiet seeks. Parameters taken into
account encompass seek length, starting location and direction, acceleration profiles of actuators,
rotational positioning (which includes differences between read and write settle times), read
cache hits vs. misses, write cache enabled vs. disabled, I/O processes that address the same
LBAs, as well as fairness algorithms to eliminate command starvation, to mention a few.

Rotational Latencies
Rotational latency is the amount of time it takes for the starting LBA to rotate under the head
after the head is on the right track. In the worst-case scenario, this could mean that the drive will
waste one full rotation before it can access the starting LBA and then continue to read from the
remaining target LBAs. Rotational latencies depend on the spindle RPM, that is, a 7200-RPM
drive will have a worst-case rotational latency of 8.3 msec, a 5400-RPM drive will need up to
11.1 msec, and a 10K-RPM drive will have up to 6 msec rotational latency. In a random
distribution of starting LBAs relative to the angular position of the drive’s head, the average
rotational latency will be one half of the worst-case latency. I/O delays in the order of
milliseconds are quite dramatic compared to the overall performance of any modern system. This
is particularly true in scenarios where modern operating systems are utilizing multi-threading or
where Hyper-Threading Technology allows quasi-simultaneous execution of independent
workloads, all of which need data from the same drive almost simultaneously.

Higher RPM spindles are one approach to reduce rotational latencies. However, increasing RPM
spindle rates carries a substantial additional cost. Rotational latencies can also be minimized by
two other approaches. The first is to re-order the commands outstanding to the drive in such a
way that the rotational latency is minimized. This optimization is similar to the linear
optimization to reduce seek latencies, but instead takes into account the rotational position of the
drive head in determining the best command to service next. A second-order optimization is to
use a feature called out-of-order data delivery. Out-of-order data delivery means that the head
does not need to access the starting LBA first but can start reading the data at any position within
the target LBAs. Instead of passing up the fraction of a rotation necessary to return to the first
LBA of the requested data chunk, the drive starts reading the requested data as soon as it has
settled on the correct track and adds the missing data at the end of the same rotation.

Using out-of-order data delivery, for the worst case, the entire transfer will be complete within
exactly one rotation of the platter. Without out-of-order data delivery, the worst case time needed
to complete the transfer will be one rotation plus the amount of time it takes to rotate over all
target LBAs.

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TECHNOLOGY USED IN HDDs

1.Tagged Command Queuing(used in PATA)

2.Native Command Queuing(used in SATA)

TAGGED COMMAND QUEUING

TCQ stands for the Tagged Command Queuing technology built into certain PATA
and SCSI hard drives. Before TCQ, an operating system was only able to send one request at a
time. In order to boost performance, it had to decide the order of the requests based on its own,
possibly incorrect, idea of what the hard drive was doing. With TCQ, the drive can make its own
decisions about how to order the requests (and in turn relieve the operating system from having
to do so). The result is that TCQ can improve the overall performance of a hard drive.

Typically, sectors nearest the current location of the drive's read/write head are serviced first.
The second-nearest location is serviced second, and so on. The queue is constantly being added
to and re-ordered based upon new incoming read/write requests and the new position of the
read/write head following the last read/write operation.

Figure 3, Illustration of seek order in TCQ and without TCQ

DISADVANTAGES

This effort was not very successful because the ATA bus started out as a reduced-pin-count ISA
bus. The requirement for software compatibility made ATA host bus adapters act like ISA bus
devices without first party DMA. When a drive was ready for a transfer, it had to interrupt the
CPU, wait for the CPU to ask the disk what command was ready to execute, respond with the
command that it was ready to execute, wait for the CPU to program the host bus adapter's third-

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party DMA engine based on the result of that command, wait for the third-party DMA engine to
execute the command, and then had to interrupt the CPU again to notify it when the DMA engine
finished the task so that the CPU could notify the thread that requested the task that the requested
task was finished. Since responding to interrupts causes much overhead, CPU utilization rose
quickly when ATA TCQ was enabled . Also, since interrupt service time can be unpredictable,
there are times when the disk is ready to transfer data but is unable to because it must wait for the
CPU to respond to the interrupt so that it knows that it needs to program the third party DMA
engine.

Therefore, this standard was rarely implemented because it caused high CPU utilization without
improving performance enough to make this worthwhile.

NATIVE COMMAND QUEUING

SATA NCQ is a new standard which does not require CPU interrupts. Like ATA
TCQ, it allows up to 32 outstanding commands per device, but was designed to take advantage
of the ability of SATA host bus adapters that are not emulating parallel ATA behavior to support
first party DMA. Instead of interrupting the CPU before the task to force it to program the host
bus adapter's DMA engine, the hard drive tells the host bus adapter which command it wants to
execute, causing the host bus adapter to program its integrated first-party DMA engine with the
parameters that were included in the command that was selected by the hard drive when it was
first issued, and then the DMA engine moves the data needed to complete the command. To
further reduce the interrupt overhead, the drive can withhold the interrupt with the task
completed messages until it gathers many of them to send at once, allowing the CPU to notify
many threads at once that their tasks have been completed. If another task completes after such
an interrupt is sent, the host bus adapter can amend the completion messages if they have not
been sent to the CPU. This allows the hard disk firmware design to trade off disk performance
against CPU utilization by determining when to withhold and when to send completion
messages.

Benefits of Native Command Queuing

It is clear that there is a need for reordering outstanding commands in order to reduce mechanical
overhead and consequently improve I/O latencies. It is also clear, however, that simply collecting
commands in a queue is not worth the silicon they are stored on. Efficient reordering algorithms
take both the linear and the angular position of the target data into account and will optimize for
both in order to yield the minimal total service time. This process is referred to as “command re-
ordering based on seek and rotational optimization” or tagged command queuing. A side effect
of command queuing and the reduced mechanical workload will be less mechanical wear,
providing the additional benefit of improved endurance. Serial ATA II provides an efficient
protocol implementation of tagged command queuing called Native Command Queuing.

Native Command Queuing achieves high performance and efficiency through efficient command
re-ordering. In addition, there are three new capabilities that are built into the Serial ATA

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protocol to enhance NCQ performance including race-free status return, interrupt aggregation,
and First Party DMA.

• Race-Free Status Return Mechanism

This feature allows status to be communicated about any command at any time. There is no
“handshake” required with the host for this status return to take place. The drive may issue
command completions for multiple commands back-to-back or even at the same time.

• Interrupt Aggregation

Generally, the drive interrupts the host each time it completes a command. The more interrupts,
the bigger the host processing burden. However, with NCQ, the average number of interrupts
per command can be less than one. If the drive completes multiple commands in a short time
span – a frequent occurrence with a highly queued workload – the individual interrupts may be
aggregated.In that case, the host controller only has to process one interrupt for multiple
commands.

• First Party DMA (FPDMA)

Native Command Queuing has a mechanism that lets the drive set up the Direct Memory Access
(DMA) operation for a data transfer without host software intervention. This mechanism is
called First Party DMA. The drive selects the DMA context by sending a DMA Setup FIS
(Frame Information Structure) to the host controller. This FIS specifies the tag of the command
for which the DMA is being set up. Based on the tag value, the host controller will load the PRD
table pointer for that command into the DMA engine, and the transfer can proceed without any
software intervention. This is the means by which the drive can effectively re-order commands
since it can select the buffer to transfer on its own initiative.

Detailed Description of NCQ

There are three main components to Native Command Queuing:

1. Building a queue of commands in the drive

2. Transferring data for each command

3. Returning status for the commands that were completed

The following sections will detail how each mechanism works.

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Building a Queue
The drive must know when it receives a particular command whether it should queue the
command or whether it should execute that command immediately. In addition, the drive must
understand the protocol to use for a received command; the command protocol could be NCQ,
DMA, PIO, etc. The drive determines this information by the particular command opcode that is
issued. Therefore in order to take advantage of NCQ, commands that are specifically for NCQ
were defined. There are two NCQ commands that were added as part of the NCQ definition in
Serial ATA II, Read FPDMA Queued and Write FPDMA Queued. The Read FPDMA Queued
command inputs are shown in Figure 1; the inputs for Write FPDMA Queued are similar. The
commands are extended LBA and sector count commands to accommodate the large capacities
in today’s drives.

The commands also contain a force unit access (FUA) bit for high availability applications.
When the FUA bit is set for a Write FPDMA Queued command, the drive will commit the data
to media before returning success for the command. By using the FUA bit as necessary on
writes, the host can manage the amount of data that has not been committed to media within the
drive’s internal cache.

One interesting field is the TAG field in the Sector Count register. Each queued command
issued has a tag associated with it. The tag is a shorthand mechanism used between the host and
the device to identify a particular outstanding command. Tag values can be between 0 and 31,
although the drive can report support for a queue depth less than 32. In this case, tag values are
limited to the maximum tag value the drive supports. Having tag values limited to be between 0
and 31 has some nice advantages, including that status for all commands can be reported in one
32-bit value. Each outstanding command must have a unique tag value.

The Read and Write FPDMA Queued commands are issued just like any other command would
be, i.e. the taskfile is written with the particular register values and then the Command register is
written with the command opcode. The difference between queued and non-queued commands
is what happens after the command is issued. If a non-queued command was issued, the drive
would transfer the data for that command and then clear the BSY bit in the Status register to tell
the host that the command was completed. When a queued command is issued, the drive will
clear BSY immediately, before any data is transferred to the host. In queuing, the BSY bit is not
used to convey command completion. Instead, the BSY bit is used to convey whether the drive
is ready to accept a new command. As soon as the BSY bit is cleared, the host can issue another
queued command to the drive. In this way a queue of commands can be built within the drive.

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Transferring Data
NCQ takes advantage of a feature called First Party DMA to transfer data between the drive and
the host. First Party DMA allows the drive to have control over programming the DMA engine
for a data transfer. This is an important enhancement since only the drive knows the current
angular and rotational position of the drive head. The drive can then select the next data transfer
to minimize both seek and rotational latencies. The First Party DMA mechanism is effectively
what allows the drive to re-order commands in the most optimal way.

As an additional optimization, the drive can also return data out-of-order to further minimize the
rotational latency. First Party DMA allows the drive to return partial data for a command, send
partial data for another command, and then finish sending the data for the first command if this is
the most efficient means for completing the data transfers.

To program the DMA engine for a data transfer, the drive issues a DMA Setup FIS to the host,
shown in Figure 2. There are a few key fields in the DMA Setup FIS that are important for
programming the DMA engine.

Figure 4, DMA setup FIS

The TAG field identifies the tag of the command that the DMA transfer is for. For host memory
protection from a rogue device, it is important to not allow the drive to indiscriminately specify
physical addresses to transfer data to and from in host memory. The tag acts as a handle to the
physical memory buffer in the host such that the drive does not need to have any knowledge of
the actual physical memory addresses. Instead, the host uses the tag to identify which PRD table
to use for the data transfer and programs the DMA engine accordingly.

The DMA Buffer Offset field is used to support out-of-order data delivery, also referred to as
non-zero buffer offset within the specification. Non-zero buffer offset allows the drive to
transfer data out-of-order or in-order but in multiple pieces.

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The DMA Transfer Count field identifies the number of bytes to be transferred. The D bit
specifies the direction of the transfer (whether it is a read or a write). The A bit is an
optimization for writes called Auto-Activate, which can eliminate one FIS transfer during a write
command.

One important note for HBA designers is that new commands cannot be issued between the
DMA Setup FIS and the completion of the transfer of the data for that DMA Setup FIS. It is
important that the drive is not interrupted while actively transferring data since taking a new
command may cause a hiccup in the transfer of data. Thus this restriction was added explicitly
in the NCQ definition. Analogously, drives cannot send a Set Device Bits FIS before the
completion

of the data transfer for that DMA Setup FIS. There is one exemption to this restriction; if an
error is encountered before all of the data is transferred, a drive may send a Set Device Bits to
terminate the transfer with error status.

After the DMA Setup FIS is issued by the drive, data is transferred using the same FISes that are
used in a non-queued DMA data transfer operation.

Status Return
Command status return is race-free and allows interrupts for multiple commands to be
aggregated. The host and the drive work in concert to achieve race-free status return without
handshakes between the host and drive. Communication between the host and drive about which
commands are outstanding is handled through a 32-bit register in the host called SActive. The
SActive register has one bit allocated to each possible tag, i.e. bit x shows the status of the
command with tag x. If a bit in the SActive register is set, it means that a command with that tag
is outstanding in the drive (or a command with that tag is about to be issued to the drive). If a
bitin the SActive register is cleared, it means that a command with that tag is not outstanding in
the drive. The host and drive work together to make sure that the SActive register is accurate at
all times.

The host can set bits in the SActive register, while the device can clear bits in the SActive
register. This ensures that updates to the SActive register require no synchronization between
the host and the drive. Before issuing a command, the host sets the bit corresponding to the tag
of the command it is about to issue. When the drive successfully completes a command, it will
clear the bit corresponding to the tag of the command it just finished.

The drive clears bits in the SActive register using the Set Device Bits FIS, shown in Figure 3.
The SActive field of the Set Device Bits FIS is used to convey successful status to the host.
When a bit is set in the SActive field of the FIS, it means that the command with the

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corresponding tag has completed successfully. The host controller will clear bits in the SActive
register corresponding to bits that are set to one in the SActive field of a received Set Device Bits
FIS.

Figure 5, Set device bits FIS

Another key feature is that the Set Device Bits FIS can convey that multiple commands have
completed at the same time. This ensures that the host will only receive one interrupt for
multiple command completions. For example, if the drive completes the command with tag 3
and the command with tag 7 very close together in time, the drive may elect to send one Set
Device Bits FIS that has both bit 3 and bit 7 set to one. This will complete both commands
successfully and is guaranteed to generate only one interrupt.

Since the drive can return a Set Device Bits FIS without a host handshake, it is possible to
receive two Set Device Bits FISes very close together in time. If the second Set Device Bits FIS
arrives before host software has serviced the interrupt for the first, then the interrupts are
automatically aggregated. This means that the host effectively only services one interrupt rather
than two thus reducing overhead.

How Applications Take Advantage of Queuing

The advantages of queuing are only realized if a queue of requests is built to the drive. One
major issue in current desktop workloads is that many applications ask for one piece of data at a
time, and often only ask for the next piece of data once the previous piece of data has been
received. In this type of scenario, the drive is only receiving one outstanding command at a time.
When only one command is outstanding at a time, the drive can perform no re-ordering and all
the benefit of queuing is lost.

Note that with the advent of Hyper-Threading Technology, it is possible to build a queue even if
applications issue one request at a time. Hyper-Threading Technology allows significantly
higher amounts of multi-threading to occur such that multiple applications are more likely to
have I/O requests pending at the same time. However, the best performance improvement can
only be achieved if applications are slightly modified to take advantage of queuing.

The modifications to take advantage of queuing are actually fairly minor. Today most
applications are written to use synchronous I/O, also called blocking I/O. In synchronous I/O,
the function call to read from or write to a file does not return until the actual read or write is
complete. In the future, applications should be written to use asynchronous I/O. Asynchronous
I/O is non-blocking, meaning that the function call to read from or write to a file will actually

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return before the request is complete. The application determines whether the I/O has completed
by checking foran event to be signaled or by receiving a callback. Since the call returns
immediately, the application can continue to do useful work, including issuing more read or
write file functions.

The preferred method for writing an application that needs to make several different file accesses
is to issue all of the file accesses using non-blocking I/O calls. Then the application can use
events or callbacks to determine when individual calls have completed. If there are a large
number of I/Os, on the order of four to eight, by issuing all of the I/Os at the same time the total
time to retrieve all of the data can be cut in half.

Conclusion
Man’s desire for faster data transmission rate is getting satisfied as technology improves. While
it was only possible to read/write data from/to an HDD in some MBps only few years back, now
the rate is in GBps. With the advent of better queuing techniques like NCQ, and interfacing
methods like SATA, HDDs now operate faster giving the performance of the system a boost.

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References
 http://www.google.com

 http://en.wikipedia.org

 http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/2579-001076.pdf

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