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.

RE3 and Caviar Black from Western Digital were the drives with the lowest access time, around 12 ms. Caviar Black achieved an access time 13.19% better than Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 and 14.62% better than Samsung Spinpoint F1 (HD103UJ). On the enterprise battle, Western Digital RE3 achieved an access time 7.42% better than Seagate Barracuda ES.2.