What is the advantage of buffering? Is buffering always effective? Justify your answer with help of an example.
I/O buffer: One type of input-output requirement arises from devices which have a very high character density as disks and tapes. With these characteristics, this is impossible to regulate communication along with devices upon a character-by-character basis. The information transfer, thus, is regulated into blocks of information. Furthermore, sometimes it may need several kind of format control to structure the information to suits the device or and data characteristics.
For example, a disk drive is different from a line printer or an image scanner.
For each of such devices, the format and structure of information is dissimilar. This should be observed that rate at that a device may give data and the rates at that an end application may consume this might be considerably not same. In spite of such differences, the OS must provide uniform and easy to utilize I/O mechanisms. Generally, this is done through providing an I/O buffer. The OS manages this buffer so as to be able to comply with the requirements of both the consumer and producer of data. Fundamentally, the buffers absorb mismatch in the data move rates of processor or memory on one side and device upon the other.