The amount of data which can be transferred between two points in a given period of time. You will usually see this term used in conjunction with storage media like hard drives, CD-ROMs, DAT backups, etc. Transfer rates become important when trying to determine if a drive can support the demands placed on it by applications like recording and playing digital audio, video, or multimedia files.
Two things to keep in mind with transfer rates:
- A drive’s transfer rate may be different for reading and writing data.
- Transfer rates are CPU dependent. Regardless of how fast your drive is, your computer can only accept data as fast as the CPU can handle it.
