Access time is another important measurement. It measures the time the hard disk drive delays to start delivering data after the computer has asked a given data. It is measured in the order of milliseconds (ms, which is equal to 0.001 s) and the lower this value, the better.

The results presented by the three programs we used were very similar, so we made arithmetic averages with the collected results and present them on the chart below.

 

The highlight here was Western Digital VelociRaptor, which had an average access time of only 7.2 ms, being 45% faster than Samsung HD322HJ, 47% faster than Seagate Barracuda 7200.10, 56% faster than Western Digital Caviar SE16 and 59% faster than Seagate Barracuda 7200.11.