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.

Here most units achieved similar results, with Western Digital RE3 achieving the best results. The worst results were achieved by Seagate SV35.3 and Hitachi Deskstar P7K500. Western Digital Caviar GP achieved an average access time a little bit worse than the other units included in our comparision.