| comp., MS |
disk buffer (A small amount of memory set aside for the purpose of storing data read from, or soon to be written to, a disk. Because disk devices are slow compared with the CPU, it is not efficient to access the disk for only one or two bytes of data. Instead, during a read, a large chunk of data is read and stored in the disk buffer. When the program wants information, it is copied from the buffer. Many requests for data can be satisfied by a single disk access. The same technique can be applied to disk writes. When the program has information to store, it writes it into the disk buffer area in memory. When the buffer has been filled, the entire contents of the buffer are written to the disk in a single operation) |
