Asynchronous and Nonbuffered I/O

In this section, we'll continue the discussion of Windows' I/O facilities and delve into asynchronous and nonbuffered I/O. If you haven't yet read the first part of this chapter, you should probably take a quick read through it before continuing.

Key Asynchronous and Nonbuffered I/O Terms and Concepts

Sector— a hardware-addressable block on a storage medium such as a hard disk. The sector size for hard disks on x86 computers is almost always 512 bytes. This means that if Windows wants to write to byte 11 or 27, it must write to the first sector of the disk; if it wants to write to byte 1961, it must write to the fourth sector of the disk. You can retrieve the sector size for a disk via the GetDiskFreeSpace ...

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