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How do I tell if my motherboard & disk drive support native command queueing? Is it in the device manager, or somewhere else? Windows has a checkbox for "Enable write caching" which is currently unchecked, but it says "This device does not allow its write cache setting to be modified".

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If you use the HD Tune tool, its Info tab shows when NCQ is supported in your system. The regular version is free for personal use.

alt text

In this example, NCQ is not supported.

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No, it does not tell if your motherboard does not support/disabled the NCQ feature. It only report your harddisk support NCQ or not, regardless the other requirement. – Dennis Cheung Jun 20 '10 at 8:19
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Requirements:

  • A chipset that supports SATA AHCI & NCQ.
  • A SATA drive that supports AHCI & NCQ.
  • AHCI is enabled in BIOS.
  • An OS installed while AHCI is enabled. Your system may not boot if it was installed in IDE emulation mode.

You can get NCQ by running your drives in AHCI mode. Windows XP requires special drivers to take advantage of AHCI mode, but Windows Vista and up have AHCI support built in. If you are runnning in IDE emulation mode then AHCI mode features are not enabled (which includes NCQ). You BIOS setup screen defines which mode the controller is running in and you should also be able to see it in Device Manager.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any program that will tell you specifically if NCQ is enabled or not.

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