• When doing a disk read or write, it takes a while for the disk head to move to the part of the disk where the data are located. This time is called the seek time and it averages 5 ms for typical disks. No data are being transferred during the seek. To maximize data transfer rates, chunks of data that will be read together should therefore be stored contiguously on disk. For example, using the numbers in Table 4.1 it may take as little as 0.2 seconds to transfer 10 megabytes (MB) from disk to memory if it is stored as one chunk, but up to 0.2+ 100× (5× 10−3) = 0.7 seconds if it is stored in 100 noncontiguous chunks because we need to move the disk head up to 100 times.