Numbers To Know medium
What is the theoretical maximum file transfer speed of a 1 Gigabit per second (1 Gbps) network link?
- A 1 GB/s (Gigabyte per second)
- B 100 MB/s (Megabytes per second)
- C 125 MB/s (Megabytes per second)
- D 10 MB/s (Megabytes per second)
Answer: C. 125 MB/s (Megabytes per second)
A '1 Gigabit' network link indicates a capacity of 1,000 Megabits per second. To convert this to the standard unit of file storage (Bytes), you divide by 8 ($1,000 / 8 = 125$), resulting in a theoretical maximum of 125 MB/s. In practice, however, the actual file transfer speed will be closer to 110-115 MB/s due to 'protocol overhead'—the extra data required for TCP/IP headers, acknowledgements, and framing. When designing a system that must move petabytes of data, even this small overhead becomes a significant factor in calculating total transfer time and cost.
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