Have you ever wondered how fast a computer is?

Have you ever wondered how fast a computer is?

Someone might answer: -"Well, several Gigabyte per second on the ram and several megabyte per second to the harddrive, how so?"

Let's take a look at it from a different perspective.

Before the computers information was saved on paper. Written by hand or machine.
An A4 paper fits about 4000 letters, depending on font, and font size.

To make it easier to count, let's say an A4 paper fits 4096 letters. That means an A4 paper fits exactly 4 Kibibyte.




A modern day hard drive can usually store ~931 Gibibyte (1000 Gigabyte) and have a transfer rate at between 50 and 80 Mebibyte/second.

Let's take a randomly chosen file that's, lets say, 7 Gibibyte (A typical DVD ISO-file) and copy it to another harddrive.
The file would be around 1 835 008 A4 papers. (~1.8 million)
An A4 weighs 80 gram. That's a total weight of 146 800 640 gram. (~146 million)
That means that a DVD/ISO-file contains information representive of 146 metric tonnes of A4 papers. That's around the weight of two subway wagons (model C20). One C20 wagon weighs around 67 tonnes.

The copying to a harddrive usually happens at a speed at around 70 Mebibyte/second.
The computer then copies, letter by letter, the equivalent of 17 920 A4 papers per second.





A DDR2-800 Mhz Ram memory in DualChannel can copy information at a speed of 7 855 Mebibyte/second.

So let's say we're copying the file from RAM to RAM instead. The RAM can copy the equivalent of 1 835 008 A4 papers in less than a second.
The computer have then copied information, whose weight is the equivalent of two subway wagons filled with 1.8 million A4 papers, in less than a second.

Blink once, and you just missed 146 tonnes of A4 paper pass by.