Question: What does it mean when hard drives have a processor on the hard drive? How does it work, and what benefit does it have?
I don’t understand – the CPU on the computer is the processor and the hard drive transfers its contents to the host computer’s RAM. Do additional processors pre-process the data somehow?
Here are some examples:
Also, routers now have processors, too. Why is that necessary? 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 of a wireless router with processor: “Dual-core processor”
I’m surprised, because the von Neumann machine model doesn’t include processors on storage
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Answer: Well, HDD always had processors, mainly to cache data and do other HDD stuff like marking bad blocks etc.
The Netgear product you linked is a NAS, which allows you to stream media from it over the network, so it’s not really a HDD. It’s more like a network connected HDD with some fancy software to allow you to stream information over the network.
Old routers also had processors, though they used to be slow and not advertised at all. The WRT54G, which came out in 2002 had a Broadcom BCM4702 running at 125Mhz. Not very fast indeed. However, these days we demand more from the routers, and features such as VPN require faster processors.