Data Transfer Rates

Overview

The term data transfer rate (DTR) is similar to throughput and refers to the amount of data that is moved from one place to another in a given time. The key difference between data transfer rate and throughput is that data transfer rates refer to any sent or received data transmission while throughput refers to the average usable data that is received by a device from its network resources only.

Generally, the DTR is calculated by dividing the size of the files (in bytes) by the time taken for making the transfer (in seconds). The result of this calculation is multiplied by eight. Data rates are typically measured in megabits (Mbps) or megabytes per second (Mbps). For typical magnetic tape operating at 800 bytes per inch and 75 inches per second, the data transfer rate is about 60 kilobytes per second. Disk storage systems have data transfer rates in excess of 3 megabytes per second and fast serial interfaces operates at speeds up to 50 Mbps. Modern DVD drives can transfer data at rate of 1.2 gigabytes per second (GB/sec). Data transfer rates between modems are measured in bps while the transfer rate between a computer and a printer is calculated in characters per second (cps).

Benefits

Data transfer rates can calculate variations in performance. With new technologies evolving every day, there are certain kinds of new devices that help you to get higher data transfer rates.

Data transfer rates can also be used to assess the performance of different kinds of peripherals like printers, scanners, webcams, cables and controllers, modems, USB devices, and so on.

How It Works

Data transfer rates are measured internally and externally. The internal transfer rate is the rate at which the hard disk can read the data from the surface of the platter, which is a round magnetic plate that constitutes a part of the hard disk.

The hard disk transfers the data to the internal drive cache or read buffer that is ready for sending information over the interface to the system. The speed at which data is sent from the read buffer over the interface to the system is known as the external data transfer rate. Internal data transfer rate, which is the real rate that data can be read from the disk, is often called as sustained transfer rate. The external data transfer rate is also known as the peak or burst transfer rate and is usually higher than the internal data transfer rate.