Why are they putting "processors" on hard drives?

Posted by Celeritas on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Celeritas
Published on 2014-08-20T04:14:44Z Indexed on 2014/08/20 4:24 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 492

Filed under:
|

What does it mean when they have a processor on the hard drive, how does it work, and what benfit does it have? I don't understand - the CPU is the processor and the hard drive transfers it's contents to RAM. Do have additional processors, preprocess the data some how?

Here's some examples

Western Digital WD Black WD1002FAEX 1TB "Dual processor speed" NETGEAR ReadyNAS 312 2-Bay Diskless Network Attached Storage "Dual-core Intel 2.1GHz processor and 2GB on-board memory"

and routers now have processors too, why's that nescecary? I guess it sort of makes sense - some logic needs to happen for the packets to be read in to know which ports to send them out on, but why did old routers not need them?

Example or wireless router with processor: "Dual-core processor"

© Super User or respective owner

Related posts about hard-drive

Related posts about cpu