No NCQ on older nvidia chipsets
So I upgraded a server to 2.6.18 as it had recently entered debian etch. There are some things I already like but one thing that I was hoping to gain, NCQ on the RAID-1 SATA drives, was not to be. Apparently this is because the sata_nv driver does not support NCQ nor is it expected to anytime soon because nvidia wishes to keep their proprietary sata controller secret. So in the logs I recevied “NCQ (depth 0/32)” which is what indicates that the drives support NCQ but the chipset driver does not. I found this handy list of sata driver status and found that there were very few production drivers with NCQ support (ahci, sata_sil24, both open designs). The upside is that ahci, which seems to be an open standard developed by intel, is being embraced by nvidia, ati, via, sis, uli in their current and future designs. I’ll probably do research into which chipsets support ahci in the future. I think for this server I may replace it with a newer cpu/mb/ram with either an intel conroe or amd brisbane cpu and a motherboard chipset with ahci support.
Update: Which chipsets support AHCI?
On the Intel side a techreport review lists the Intel ICH7R and ICH8R as the only chipsets with ahci support and that none of the nVidia chipsets (5xx and 6xx series) do so. Though other reports have listed the 570 as having ahci. Intel’s ICH8, ICH7, ICH6, ICH5, ICH5R all do not support AHCI but the ICH7DH does according to Intel relayed on the linux-ide mailing list (which also links to a blog post about getting NCQ to work in linux).
The ATI SB600 supports AHCI.
Update 2: Intel has a list of chipsets with ahci support.
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"No NCQ on older nvidia chipsets" was written on December 13, 2006 and filed in all, hardware