First-come, first-served (FCFS) is the simplest device-scheduling algorithm; it is easy to
program and essentially fair to users. However, on average, it doesn’t meet any of the
three goals of a seek strategy. To illustrate, consider a single-sided disk with one recordable
surface where the tracks are numbered from 0 to 49. It takes 1 ms to travel from one
track to the next adjacent one. For this example, let’s say that while retrieving data from
Track 15, the following list of requests has arrived: Tracks 4, 40, 11, 35, 7, and 14. Let’s
also assume that once a requested track has been reached, the entire track is read into
main memory. The path of the read/write head looks like the graph shown in Figure 7.15.