So far we have covered a number of different aspects of the computer including the CPU, RAM and hard drives. What is very important is that all part of the computer and all peripheral components must be able to talk to each other, and that is what we will be covering in this edition – transfer rates.
Data transfer rates are measured in bits per second (bps) and obviously the higher number that you can achieve, the faster you can get data between your different devices. Now you may be wondering why it is necessary to know this, well the simple way for me to help you understand is with a real life situation: if you plug a USB 2.0 device into a USB 1.0 plug, windows will tell you that the device can perform faster. What it is saying is that the device can perform roughly 40x faster which will save you time. It might just be a few seconds on small files, but when transferring massive amounts of data the time saved is greatly increased.
So the most common places that data is transferred – which will be of concern to you are the following:
- USB devices (including flash drives, external Hard drives and cell phones)
- FireWire devices (usually external HDD’s)
- Network connections
So let’s start with the USB connections. The most used version is 2.0 which transfers data at 480Mbps. This is compared with the older 1.0 which has a maximum transfer rate of 12 Mbps. The new and latest 3.0 ups that to a maximum of 5Gbps, this is 10 times faster than 2.0. What you must know, is that this is a theoretical maximum, and while it can attain those speeds, it is only for a small amount of time, and the actual continual speeds which you can attain are much slower than these.
FireWire is different to USB in that the speeds that they reach are continual speeds. There are two versions available at present: FireWire 400 and FireWire 800. The former transferring data at 400Mbps and the later at 800Mbps. The nice thing is that you can expect these speeds continually, making it perfect for all audio-visual environment.
In the present day we all connect to networks either at home of at work, using either cable or wireless. What you must know is that no matter what you do, wireless data transfer will almost always be slower than wired networks. Wireless networks are said to be 54Mbps that compared to the best wired network of 1Gbps. So when the option is there, connect to the cable. Also know that in reality the speeds are slower than this, and as you move away from the source of the wireless network, your speed slows even more.
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