Patent ID: 7805543

Claim:
A host bus adapter (HBA) for a host device comprising: a controller of the host bus adapter for the host device; a serial advanced technology attachment (SATA) Native Command Queuing (NCQ) tag management unit of the controller; a memory of the SATA NCQ tag management unit of the controller of the HBA to store information for each of a plurality of different NCQ tag values, wherein the information for each NCQ tag value indicates whether or not a command corresponding to each respective NCQ tag value has been issued; and an NCQ tag selection circuit of the SATA NCQ tag management unit of the controller of the HBA in communication with the memory, the NCQ tag selection circuit to examine the information in the memory and select an NCQ tag value having information that indicates that a command having the selected NCQ tag value has not been issued, and to perform host-side assignment of the selected NCQ tag value to a given command prior to issuance of the given command; and logic of the HBA to include the selected NCQ tag value in a command frame information structure (FIS).