Seek time

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Seek time is one of the several delays associated with reading or writing data on a computer's disk drive. In order to read or write data in a particular place on the disk, the read/write head of the disk needs to be moved to the correct place (just as to play a particular song on a cassette of recorded music, the tape needs to be wound to the right place). This process is known as "seeking", and the time it takes for the head to move to the right place is the "seek time". Seek time for a given disk varies depending on how far the head's destination is from its origin at the time of each read or write instruction; usually one discusses a disk's average seek time.

As of 2004, a typical seek time for a hard disc is about 9 ms. Hard disc drives achieve this speed by having a small, lightweight head assembly. Floppy disk drives and optical drives (such as CD or DVD drives) have much larger head assemblies than hard discs, resulting in them having longer seek times.