Thursday, October 11, 2012

Types of I/O Devices



  • Block devices

Organize data in fixed-size blocks
Transfers are in units of blocks
Blocks have addresses and data are therefore addressable
E.g. hard disks, USB disks, CD-ROMs


  • Character devices

Delivers or accepts a stream of characters, no block structure
Not addressable, no seeks
Printers, network interfaces, terminals

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall08/cos318/lectures/Lec11-Devices.pdf
   

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