Today at the Intel Developer Forum in San Jose, Seagate is demonstrating the first Serial ATA hard drive to offer Native Command Queuing, out-of-order delivery and first-party DMA (Direct Memory Access) technologies - features that are enabled on Seagate's newest Serial ATA hard drive, the Barracuda 7200.7. Native Command Queuing is unique to Seagate's products because to date, only Seagate's Native Serial ATA architecture can support this feature. Seagate has led industry efforts to develop Serial ATA, was first to bring it to market, and continues to develop Serial ATA technology that can take advantage of the most advanced Serial ATA functionality.

Serial ATA Native Command Queuing will significantly increase I/O performance in entry-level server systems, compared with servers using other Serial ATA or Parallel ATA solutions. It enables a Serial ATA hard drive to take a set of incoming commands and reorder them intelligently before accessing the data and submitting it back to the host for action. Serial ATA Native Command Queuing allows a queue depth of up to 32 outstanding commands.

Seagate's newest Serial ATA products with Native Command Queuing, first-party DMA and out-of-order command execution will provide a new advantage for the cost-sensitive entry-level server market in which SCSI's extremely high queue depth and feature rich command sets are not needed. Serial ATA Native Command Queuing is designed for the needs of PCs, entry-level servers and new markets such as fixed-content and near-line storage subsystems. Low transactional servers running applications like Web hosting, IT collaboration, and network and print servers where cost-per-gigabyte is especially important can all benefit from Serial ATA Native Command Queuing.

Serial ATA Native Command Queuing is similar in some ways to SCSI command queuing, but SCSI allows 256 queue levels. SCSI command queuing also continues to provide unique intelligent data handling features such as head of queue and out of order queuing that enable a system to reorder commands within the interface and reprioritize specific commands, even after they've been submitted - features that are critical to the mid-range and high-end servers that enterprise applications depend on.

Seagate worked together with Intel and Silicon Image to develop the demonstration. The set up includes Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 Native Serial ATA hard drives, an Intel Pentium IV 2GHz processor and motherboard, and a Silicon Image SATALink(tm) SiI 3512 PCI-to-Serial ATA host controller.