What is Seek Time?
A disk is divided into many circular tracks. Seek Time is defined as the time required by the read/write head to move from one track to another. Example, Consider the following diagram, the read/write head is currently on track 1.
Now, on the next read/write request, we may want to read data from Track 4, in this case, our read/write head will move to Track 4. The time it will take to reach track 4 is the seek time.
Seek Time in OS
Seek Time is one of the key components of Disk Scheduling, Before going to Seek Time, let’s first discuss Disk Scheduling. Disk Scheduling is done by operating systems to schedule I/O requests arriving for the disk. Disk scheduling is also known as I/O Scheduling. Multiple I/O requests may arrive by different processes and only one I/O request can be served at a time by the disk controller. Thus other I/O requests need to wait in the waiting queue and need to be scheduled.
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