average seek time


average seek time

(storage)The mean time it takes to move the head of adisk drive from one track to another, averaged over thesource and destination cylinders. Usually measured inmilliseconds (ms).

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

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