In this video from ITFreeTraining, I will be looking at network speeds and limitations. This will allow you to understand the true speed that you will get out of your network connection and what limitations you may encounter. This will allow you to realistically determine what sort of performance you can expect from your network.
Bits and Bytes and Beyond
Before I start looking at what kinds of speeds you can achieve, I will first look at the basics of how data in a computer is organized. This becomes important later when you start attempting to work out what kinds of speeds you can expect from your network.
To start with, consider the smallest piece of data on a computer is a bit. A bit is stored inside a computer using the on or off state. So essentially it has two states, so it can be used to store a one or a zero.
If you group 8 bits together you get what is referred to as a byte. A byte is a fundamental unit of measurement that many other units of measurement are derived from.
Next, I will look at how data is measured by looking at the decimal system. The decimal system for measuring data comes from the international system of units often abbreviated to SI. It is based on a base of one thousand. As you move down the table, essentially a thousand is raised to a higher power. With each power, one thousand is raised, so there is also a symbol and name that goes with it.
To start with, you have one thousand bytes known as a Kilobyte. Going down the table you have; Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte, Petabyte, Exabyte, Zettabyte and lastly Yottabyte. Later in the video I will give you an example of each of these to give you an appreciation of how much data each one of these stores.
As we have already covered, computers store data as either a one or a zero. This gives us two possible values. For this reason, it should be no surprise that this forms the basic building block for data inside a computer.
For this reason, data inside a computer is often grouped into 1024-byte blocks rather than 1000-byte blocks as shown. The binary system has a different naming convention. However, before looking at it, you should know that often, one system is used to calculate the number of bytes and the other is used to represent it. Without converting between the two systems, this will lead to some errors in the amount of data represented.
To better understand this, consider that using the binary convention, 1024 bytes would be a kibibyte. Using a decimal convention, a kilobyte would be 1000 bytes giving us a 24-byte difference. The problem is not so much that there is a difference, it is that the binary convention is rarely used. Often 1024 bytes will be said as a kilobyte. This means you essentially don’t know when someone refers to a kilobyte if they are talking about a kilobyte or kibibyte.
This small difference gets bigger as we go down to mebibyte, gigibyte, tebibyte and beyond. A perfect example of this is when you purchase a hard disk and it is sold as a certain size. When you format the drive, it is often reported by Windows as smaller in size then what it is sold as. This is because the hard drive manufacturer is selling it using the decimal convention and the operating system is reporting the size in the binary convention.
It would be good if the manufacturer reported the size of the hard disk using both the decimal and binary conventions, so you know what you are buying, however, I think it comes down to marketing and basically this is the way it has always been done. Something to keep in mind when buying a hard disk!
When you start looking at network speed, it becomes important to understand which convention is being used, because if you don’t convert between them when performing estimates, your estimates will be wrong. Let’s have a look at what effect this may have.
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References
“Byte” en.wikipedia.o...
“Data-rate units” en.wikipedia.o...
“Internet traffic” en.wikipedia.o...
“Why does Explorer use the term KB instead of KiB?” blogs.msdn.mic...
“World's Fastest Internet - 1.6 TERABITS per Second” • World's Fastest Intern...
“The world’s fastest internet speeds ever recorded will blow your hair back” www.dailydot.c...
“FILE TRANSFER TIME CALCULATOR” techinternets....
“Dreamhack 2010 Behind The Scenes: A Sea Of Computers “ • Dreamhack 2010 Behind ...
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