Hi,
Is Block I/O necessarily a SCSI thing? I thought 'dd' command could be
used for block I/O over devices like floppy, CDROM, and IDE device?
Am I wrong?
File I/O is an I/O which is thought to be happening on logical entity "file".This is
purely an user level interpretation of data which file-systems portrays .
As its name indicates Block I/O is the chunked I/O.Its the thing that happens between file-system
and the block-device (maybe routed via volume manager).
The File I/O request is translated into Block I/O request when it comes to
_actually_ reading/writing data from/to the disk.This block I/O can be cached I/O
or non-cached (unbuffered) I/O (DIRECT I/O).
The data is read or written in chunks (called blocks) from disk for efficiency reasons.
I hope now file i/o and block i/o are somewhat clearer :)
~Sushil
