Note, however, that reported access times can be misleading because most memory chips, especially DRAM chips, require a pause between back-to-back accesses. This is one reason why SRAM is so much faster than DRAM, even when the reported access times are equivalent; SRAM doesn't require any refreshes, so there is no pause between back-to-back accesses. A more important measurement of a chip's speed, therefore, is its cycle time, which measures how quickly two back-to-back accesses can be made.

Access time is also frequently used to describe the speed of disk drives. Disk access times are measured in milliseconds (thousandths of a second), often abbreviated as ms. Fast hard disk drives for personal computers boast access times of about 9 to 15 milliseconds. Note that this is about 200 times slower than average DRAM.

The access time for disk drives includes the time it actually takes for the read/write head to locate a sector on the disk (called the seek time). This is an average time since it depends on how far away the head is from the desired data.