What is 10GB/s: A Robotic Performance

  • Robotic Performance

(This is the first in a four-part post that puts a 10GB/s throughput rate in perspective.)

Let’s say that you’re not normal. Not abnormal or anything like that, more like superhuman, or even non-human. You’re an office robot, and you’re looking forward to some time away from your desk so you can finally get to watching all of the movies you always wanted to see. Somebody has already installed the entire U.S. library of Netflix movies onto one of your solid state drives (SSD), but because you’re working in a startup in the Silicon Valley, you never had time to see any of them.

The Need for Speed

Super-you is special in that you don’t need to watch a video in real time…you can enjoy one as quickly as its file can be transferred from your SSD to an image display—in your case, your throughput, or transfer rate, is 10 gigabytes per second (GB/s). Your manager says that you can only be off the grid for approximately half an hour, so you put your processors to work calculating just how many of those movies you could expect to see in that given period.

In no time at all, you realize you can watch all of them!

According to a March 2016 report by Allflicks.com, Netflix’s online catalog for its United States-based users includes 4,335 movies (not counting television shows). If we take all of these movies and assume the average run time for each is 1.5 hours, then we see that it would take somebody like non-super-me a little more than 6,502 hours, or almost 271 days, to watch the entire library in one, continuously long sitting. Food runs, naps, and bathroom breaks would increase this time dramatically.

Super-you, however, would shoot through the library so quickly that even if taking care of hunger, exhaustion, or the call of nature were part of your normal routine, you’d be finished with your movie-binging long before any of these became a factor.

One hour of standard video has a file size of approximately 3GB. With movies running on average 90 minutes, each takes up roughly 4.5GB of capacity. A quick calculation reveals that the 4,335 movies in the Netflix library take up approximately 19,500GB (19.5TB) of capacity. At your transfer rate of 10GB/s, super-you determines that it will take 1,950 seconds, or only 32 minutes, to get through the entire U.S. Netflix movie library for a user like yourself.

In other words, super-you would be viewing the closing credits of the 4,335th movie in that library just as non-super-me was starting to understand the punchline to the last joke in a 30-minute episode of The Big Bang Theory.

A Bit of Reality

Of course, our example of a movie-addict automaton is purely hypothetical, but the given throughput of its SSD is not: In early March, Seagate Technology unveiled a production-ready unit of the fastest single solid-state drive (SSD) demonstrated to date, which showed a throughput performance of 10GB/s.

Throughput—along with input output/operations per second (IOPS) and latency—is a standard metric to describe drive performance and specifically relates to the amount of data that is flowing to or from the SSD. Like most metrics that describe the transfer or flow of something, throughput is expressed as a unit of something per a unit of time. Hence, an engineer would use the term bytes per second (B/s) to describe the amount of data that can flow to or from an SSD just as a fireman might use the term gallons per minute (g/m) to describe the amount of water that can flow through his hose.

In the case of our robot’s SSD, we described the throughput as 10GB/s. But what exactly is a gigabyte? And how does it relate to a byte? That will be the subject of the next section of this post.

2017-12-06T15:22:29+00:00

About the Author:

Kent Smith