A storage subsystem is disclosed that maintains statistics regarding errors detected via an ECC module of the storage subsystem; andor historical data regarding operating conditions experienced by the storage subsystem, such as temperature, altitude, humidity, shock, andor input voltage level. A first seek time is computed corresponding to a first seek profile, and second seek time is computed which is greater than the first seek time. In another aspect, a decoder receives an encoded bitplane and decodes the bitplane, wherein the bitplane indicates AC prediction status information for plural macroblocks of a video picture. The seed image is compared to a collection of images using the distance measure.