Latency (engineering) - Mechanical Latency

Mechanical Latency

Any mechanical process encounters limitations modeled by Newtonian physics. The behavior of disk drives provides an example of mechanical latency. Here, it is the time needed for the data encoded on a platter to rotate from its current position to a position adjacent to the read-write head as well as the seek time required for the actuator arm for the read-write head to be positioned above the appropriate track. This is also known as rotational latency and seek time since the basic term latency is also applied to the time required by a computer's electronics and software to perform polling, interrupts, and direct memory access.