average seek time

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average seek time



The mean time it takes to move the head of a disk drive from one track to another, averaged over the source and destination cylinders.

The average seek time gives a good measure of the speed of the drive in a multi-user environment where successive read/write request are largely uncorrelated.

Ten ms is common for a hard disk and 200 ms for an eight-speed CD-ROM.

(1997-07-22)