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For a magnetic disk with concentric circular tracks, the seek latency is not linearly proportional to the seek distance due to

  1. non-uniform distribution of requests

  2. arm starting and stopping inertia

  3. higher capacity of tracks on the periphery of the platter

  4. use of unfair arm scheduling policies

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Best answer
35 votes
35 votes
The answer is B, because due to Inertia

Whenever your read-write head moves from $1$ track to another track, it has to face resistance due to change in state of motion including speed and direction, which is nothing but inertia. Hence the answer is B.
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Note that we are asked “why seek latency is not linearly proportional to the seek distance”, that is why “duration required to travel a distance is not linearly proportional to the distance”. This definitely has to do with either the road surface or road shape. The surface here is uniform magnetic, but road shape does change. Here we don’t take turns, but put break and go on reverse gear, again put break and drive straight. Stopping a moving car takes time, it doesn’t stop instantly. Similarly accelerating stopped car to full speed takes time.
Why not option A: We have not been asked anything related to going to different cities located far from each other.
Why not option B: Tracks might be related with rotational latency / timings but has nothing to do with seek time.
Why not option C: Question is simple. Its just asking why going from one position to another takes different time each time. Policy come in to play when we are asked to read different sectors to decide which sectors to read first (if I am correctly interpreting what is meant by policy).

Answer:

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