Random access
ABILITY TO ACCESS AN ARBITRARY ELEMENT OF A SEQUENCE IN EQUAL TIME
Random-access storage; Random access file; Random-access; Random I/O; Random read; Random write; Direct access (computing)
Random access (more precisely and more generally called direct access) is the ability to access an arbitrary element of a sequence in equal time or any datum from a population of addressable elements roughly as easily and efficiently as any other, no matter how many elements may be in the set. In computer science it is typically contrasted to sequential access which requires data to be retrieved in the order it was stored.