
Transferring data from the hard drive via SATA usually moves much faster than the drive can read and write data to the platters. Each one of them takes time, and they rarely sync up. There are a bunch of different steps to retrieving data from a hard drive. Since there is a decent likelihood that the surrounding data is similar, the drive assumes that the user or process will also request the surrounding data soon. When a user or a program requests data (reminds me of Tron), the hard drive reads that data and the data around it from the platter and stores it all in the buffer. Therefore, hard drives try to compensate by guessing. The spinning platters and read/write heads are inherently limited by physical moving parts, which are much slower than solid-state drives that have no moving components. Typically, a hard drive doesn’t just pick up the data that it needs.

This action speeds up the drive’s performance. The hard disk drive (HDD) holds data in its cache that you or your programs are using most frequently and, most recently, eliminating the need to pull it from the platters each time that the data is needed. Very often, a hard drive is working with the same data repeatedly, since the person using the computer is usually working on one or two tasks at a time. How Does It Work?Īs the hard drive reads and writes data, it pulls it from the platters. Hard drive cache allows a hard drive to do the same thing when reading and writing data. The video player waits before or during playback to collect data so that it can continue playing the video more smoothly as it progresses. Everyone has dealt with streaming a video on a slow connection. You can also think of hard drive cache as something similar to buffering when it comes to streaming content.

The cache works in conjunction with the microcontroller to store memory as it’s being processed. Hard drives have built-in microcontrollers that govern and process data coming in and out, much like a CPU. You can think of a hard drive’s cache as being like random-access memory (RAM) that is specifically designed for the hard drive. It acts as a temporary memory space while the hard drive reads and writes data to the permanent storage on the platters. By that name, its purpose becomes a little c.


Hard drive cache is often known as the disk buffer.
