[rescue] A5000, 22x9.1GB, QLogic QLA2100F controller, asking $550

[nate at portents.com]

> Are there FC-AL drives around that don't reorder their operations for
> performance/reliability?  There are quite a few SATA drives that don't.

Most current generation SATA drives do have NCQ, though of course it
doesn't help much to have it on for single-user/workstation type tasks. 
This comparison concludes the firmware has more to do with how good a
drive is than any specification (again, depending on application):

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/storage/roundup-scsi2005.html

"Hitachi and Seagate drives make sense only if you plan a purely active
server operation, as in most cases their performance slumps noticeably
under simpler loads. In such cases WD Raptors often offer a better
price/performance ratio. If you plan on using 10K Seagate drives for such
tasks, you'd better set them to Performance Mode (just a mouse click in
Seatools Enterprise)... In conclusion I want to emphasize that long gone
are the times when performance superiority of a given professional hard
disk drive was governed almost solely by its physical properties (transfer
rates, access times, interface transfer rates, buffer size) Lately we
have often found that products with similar specifications may demonstrate
cardinally different performance in various applications. That is physical
properties become less important for HDD leadership than the expertise of
programmers, who code and optimize firmware versions."

- Nate