Advanced Mac OS X Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

Buffered I/O vs. Unbuffered I/O

With buffered I/O, there is a lot of data copying happening:

program structures –> FILE buffer –> kernel buffer –> disk.

With unbuffered I/O, the copy to the FILE buffer is avoided, and with scatter/gather I/O, the kernel might be able to avoid a copy into its own buffers.

Since read() and write() are not buffered (except for a disk block or two in the kernel data structures), they can be slow when dealing with lots of smaller reads and writes. Buffered I/O would be a win here.

When doing big reads and writes, say dozens of K of image data, there is a win to using plain read() and write() calls to avoid the buffering step in between.

Fundamentally, everything boils down to the file descriptor. Even FILEs have ...