Slowest-seeking floppy or hard drive ever made?

On 26 Feb 2012 at 17:04, Philip Pemberton wrote: I don't know if it was the absolute slowest, but the early single- sided Micropolis drives (1015/16) were pretty darned slow--about 30 msec. track to track, if my memory is correct. You would actually wait a bit to get from track 77 to track 0. I suspect this was due to the 4-step per track scheme that Micropolis used. I just dredged up a copy of the driver that I did back in 1978 or so for a system. The WD1781 r1r0 bits were "11" for the positioning commands, so it seems as if 30 msec. is correct. Last-gasp Micropolis floppies actually used a buffered-seek positioning scheme--but it wasn't enough to save the line. Even the Memorex 650 drives were only 10 msec. track-to-track. There may be some super-low-cost drives used in typewriters or game consoles that were slower, but I'm not aware of any. That being said, the Micropolis drives were very consistent in their seeks and were nearly indestructible. And they were expensive. --Chuck