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A buffer is a chunk of fast memory that caches data from a slower IO device.

When reading data from a disk, a great deal of time is spent "seeking", which means physically moving the read head, and waiting for the disk to spin to the right place. If the application needs to read one byte at a time, then a lot of time is wasted seeking each time.

A buffer solves this problem. When accessing the disk, it seeks once, then reads thousands of bytes into memory at once. Now, when you need to read one byte at a time, they are read from the buffer, rather than from the disk. Depending on the size of the buffer, the effective seek time per byte can be made negligibly small.

Generally, there may be buffers in both the hardware and the operating system, which make the process transparent at the programming level. When the external device is writable, then care must be taken to ensure that the buffer contents remain current with the data on the device.

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