Built-in Methods for Faster Access to Data in the HDD

Usage of inertial mechanical units in hard disk drives construction sharply limits the time of access to the information. At the average, it takes the hard drive about 15 milliseconds to search the track and wait for the important sector. Storage devices manufacturers use various technologies that allow accelerating data exchange: read-ahead, write-back cache, command overlapping, tagged command queuing (TCQ). It enables increasing the HDD performance, reducing the number of physical accesses to the magnetic disk, and allows the hard drive to perform readings or writings even at the busy bus. Usage of lazy write technology and read-ahead requires the presence of fast random access memory in the HDD. The size of the random access memory in modern hard disk drives reaches 64 MB.