How is a file taken from the Hard drive?

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It can be, and in most cases it is. The CPU contains what is known as a DMA controller. DMA stands for Direct Memory Access. DMA allows a peripheral such as a hard disk drive or a network interface controller to access the system's physical address space (and accordingly, the system's physical memory) without involving the CPU at all until the transfer is completed. This allows the CPU to continue chugging along doing whatever it is that it wishes to do while the DMA controller handles the memory operation between the hard disk drive and the system memory. Once the operation is completed, the DMA controller will send an interrupt to the...
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turkey3_scratch

turkey3_scratch

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Hard drive data is separated into disks, sectors, and clusters:
recover-hard-drive-sectors-and-clusters.gif

Your operating system contains a special file that is requested by the motherboard, and basically this file tells the operating what disk, sector, and cluster. Hard drives store data physically, which is why data is not lost when electricity is not flowing through. There is a special property of quantum mechanics used to decode the physical data off a hard drive and turn it into electronic data.

Note: I am not an expert on hard drives but am happy to share that info with you!
 
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turkey3_scratch

turkey3_scratch

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I am pretty sure. Actually, I think it would go to the CPU and let that decide what to do with it. The CPU is the component that writes data to the RAM, there is no pathway directly from the HDD to the RAM.
 
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Pinhedd

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It can be, and in most cases it is. The CPU contains what is known as a DMA controller. DMA stands for Direct Memory Access. DMA allows a peripheral such as a hard disk drive or a network interface controller to access the system's physical address space (and accordingly, the system's physical memory) without involving the CPU at all until the transfer is completed. This allows the CPU to continue chugging along doing whatever it is that it wishes to do while the DMA controller handles the memory operation between the hard disk drive and the system memory. Once the operation is completed, the DMA controller will send an interrupt to the CPU to inform it of such.
 
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