I/O Devices
Input/Output (I/O) devices
- allow programs to communicate with "the outside" world
- have significantly different characteristics to memory-based data
- varying in their characteristics (storeable?, capacity, speed, chunk size)
Memory-based data
- fast (ns) random access via (virtual) address
- transfer data in units of bytes, halfwords, words
Device data
- much slower (ms) access, random or sequential
- some (eg disk drives) transfer data in blocks (e.g. 128B, 512B, 4KB, ...)
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