Spooling refers to the use of a temporary storage area, a buffer held in memory for a peripheral device to access when it's ready to process the instruction. This is because devices access data at different speeds. Job references are stored in the spool queue, according to priorities. This technique allows slower devices to interact with faster ones; an example is when data is stored to a disk drive when printing. The CPU is much faster than the printer so references are stored in a queue.