Noun

1. The time interval between the issuing of a request to read data from or write data to a storage device and the completion of this action.
   • 1986, Roger R Flynn, An Introduction to Information Science

     Random access files have a fast access time, but they cannot easily produce sequential lists.

2. An item of metadata indicating when a file was last accessed.
   • 2005, Brian Wotring, Bruce Potter, Marcus J Ranum, Rainer Wichmann, Host Integrity Monitoring Using Osiris and Samhain

     It is difficult to monitor both the access time and the change time, because monitoring the file attributes resets the access time...