seek time

time required to move the disk head (Computers)

Seek time is one of the several delays associated with reading or writing data on a computer's disk drive, and somewhat similar for CD or DVD drives. The others are rotational delay and transfer time. In order to read or write data in a particular place on the disk, the read/write head of the disk needs to be physically moved to the correct 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.
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Noun
1. (computer science) the time it takes for a read/write head to move to a specific data track
(hypernym) time interval, interval
(hyponym) track-to-track seek time
(part-holonym) access time
(classification) computer science, computing

The time required for the access arm of a direct-access storage device to be positioned on the appropriate track. Synonym positioning time.

<storage> The time it takes for a disk drive to move its head(s) from one track to another. The seek time depends on the power of the servo, the mass of the heads, the number of tracks traversed and the time taken to position the heads over the target track accurately enough to start data transfer.
See also: average seek time, minimum seek time, maximum seek time.
(1997-07-15)