What Is Seek Time?

Seek time is when you look for where your data is stored when you want to access it. Other delays include transfer time (data rate) and rotational delay (latency). Seek time is the most critical factor in a hard disk drive's performance since it affects read/write speed. The average time for a modern desktop drive is about 10ms, but some are faster than that. Some enterprise-grade drives can hit as low as 3ms! While many different types of hard drives are on the market, they all have many things in common. One of these things is that they all have to seek time. These are measured in milliseconds; as you might guess, they are how long your computer takes to find information on your hard drive. Imagine you are at a party and want to whisper something to someone across the room. You cannot just yell it because that would be rude. So instead, you walk over to them and say whatever it is you want to say. That is basically how hard drives work. When anything is read or written to a disc drive, the read/write head of the disc needs to move to the correct position. The physical positioning of the read/write head of the disc is called seeking. The time it takes the read/write head of the disc to move from one part of the disk to another is called the seek time. The seek time can differ for a given disc due to the varying distance from the start point to where the read/write head has been instructed to go. Due to these variables, seek time is generally measured as an average seek time. Seeking is the time it takes for your computer's read/write head to move from one position on a disc to another. The average seek time is measured as an average of all of these individuals seeking times, which can differ based on how far apart they are, and that distance varies depending on what you are trying to do.