What does your computer mean by save the file?

Answer 1

1. Microsoft Word tells the operating system (such as Windows '98) to store your letter in the hard drive.

2. Your letter, which is currently hanging out in the computer's main memory (located on the motherboard), hops on the hard drive interface, and rides it to the hard drive's cache buffer.

3. Upon arriving in the cache buffer, your letter is met by the hard disk controller.

4. The hard disk controller receives a communication from the operating system: "Controller, please store the document at this address: ****."

5. The read/write heads move into position over the correct track and wait for the correct sector to pass under. As soon as it does, the elected head starts writing the letter onto the elected platter. But what if the document is really huge and can't fit onto one sector? If the next sectors on the track are empty, the drive will continue writing the document there. If the track fills up and there is still more writing to be done, however, the drive's first choice will be to switch heads. Since the heads all move in unison, all the other heads are positioned over the same track on their respective platter surfaces. It is faster to use an alternate head than to reposition the heads over a new track. A sequential group of tracks is referred to as a cylinder, because they are one on top of another, not side by side. This brings up another interesting point. After you've owned a hard drive for a while, the availability of long sequential platter space grows scarce.

Things start getting messy as you throw files away and add new ones. When this happens your hard drive is said to be fragmented. As a hard drive becomes more and more fragmented it loses efficiency because it is forced to spend more time repositioning its read/write heads. However, you can do what's called defragmenting your hard drive. You just need a defragmenting program, which isn't expensive. The program will reorganize the data on your hard drive for optimum efficiency.

Answer 2

Tocopydatafrom a temporary area to a more permanentstoragemedium. When you edit afilewith aword processor, for example, the word processor copies the entire file, or portions of the file, into an area ofmain memorycalled abuffer. Any changes you make to the file are made to the copy in the buffer, not to the real file on thedisk. The buffer is temporary -- as soon as you exit theprogramor turn off thecomputer, the buffer disappears. To record your modifications to the file on the disk, you must save the file. When you do this, the word processor copies the contents of the buffer back to the file on the disk, replacing the previous version of the file.

Because computers can break down at any moment, it is a good idea to save your files periodically. Otherwise, you will lose all the work you have done during an editing session. Manyapplicationsautomatically save files at regular intervals, which you can specify. These intermediate saves are sometimes calledsnapshots.