

For example, a hard drive that has a maximum transfer rate of 100 Mbps has twice the throughput of a drive that can only transfer data at 50 Mbps. Similarly, a 54 Mbps wireless connection has roughly 5 times as much throughput as a 11 Mbps connection. However, the actual data transfer speed may be limited by other factors such as the Internet connection speed and other network traffic. Therefore, it is good to remember that the maximum throughput of a device or network may be significantly higher than the actual throughput achieved in everyday use.

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Definition from the PC Glossary