Another issue associated with CD-ROM drives is the time it takes to find what you want to read from the disc. This is known as seek time. The Multimedia PC standard states that the average seek time must be 1 second or less. Remember, this is time added to the time required to transfer the data. Your objective when designing a title, regardless of the authoring method used, is to reduce the number of seeks the drive has to make to access your data.
One way to do this is to have your program retrieve commonly used information on its first seek to the disc—for example, an index to all the text in your title—and then write that information in a temporary file on the hard disk. This temporary file is known as a cache. Since hard disks have faster access times than CD-ROM drives, the program would look in the cache rather than waste time performing another seek to the CD.