average seek time (storage) 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. Usually measured in milliseconds (ms).
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. Last updated: 2007-03-16
