Not necessarily. If you're using it a tape drive, it requires you to scroll through half of the entire tape on average every time, but fast-forwarding a tape is

Not necessarily. If you're using it a tape drive, it requires you to scroll through half of the entire tape on average every time, but fast-forwarding a tape is a faster operation than actually reading the entire tape. Other sequential access data store may have similar behavior--i.e., if you are accessing data from a scrolling/paging API that lets you skip ahead and drop pages, but doesn't let you back up without restarting.