Re: Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It?

You need RAM to make this work, and a few MB of HDD side cache isn't a huge
cost if one would have already needed the same stuff to make the HDD work.

Indeed, AFAIK, what we call "HDD cache" is actually just the RAM used
by the embedded CPU inside the drive for its operation.
I expect this is used to store the information about in-flight requests
(e.g. most importantly the data about the write requests received but
that haven't yet reached the platters), but I also expects it holds data
that happened to fly recently by the read-head, just in case.


        Stefan