On Friday 28 September 2007, Karl Larsen wrote: > I was lead to mis-understand the data rate of my new SATA hard > drive. It indicated that the data rate was 3 GB/sec. But some checking > with Google said the Hard Drive makers are very free with their units. > To be specific a SATA drive is 3000 MegaBits/second. This boils down to > about 375 MB. Due to the 8B/10B coding used in SATA, you can divide the bitrate by ten and not eight to get the byterate. Thus, 3Gb/s is 300MB/s at the wire. The semi-standard way of differentiating between bits per second and bytes per second in specs is to use a lower-case b for bits, and an upper-case B for bytes, but unfortunately not everyone follows that. -- Lamar Owen Chief Information Officer Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute 1 PARI Drive Rosman, NC 28772 (828)862-5554 www.pari.edu
