The fastest possible mechanical transition a hard drive or optical drive can make when shifting its read/write head from one data track to the immediately adjacent one. It is a baseline mechanical latency metric, measured in milliseconds. Engineers use this figure alongside average seek time to evaluate actuator performance and track-to-track stepping delays.
Heard on the job
The spec sheet boasts a minimum seek time of 0.8 milliseconds, but random reads are still bottlenecked by rotational latency.
Also heard as
- track-to-track seek time