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Speed comparison between USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and SATA and Firewire

Which external connection has the highest data throughput with respect to the headers used? I would appreciate a slowest to fastest list including USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800 and eSata considering bandwidth that is consumed by command and control (reducing the data bandwidth availability).

If RAM is cheap, why don't we load everything to RAM and run it from there?

RAM is cheap, and much faster than SSDs. It's just volatile. So why don't computers have a LOT of RAM, and on power up, load everything to the RAM from the hard drive/SSD and just run everything from there, assuming there's no real need to persist anything outside of memory? Wouldn't computers be much faster?

Of course, current operating system may not support this at all, but is there any reason RAM isn't used this way?

How long would it take to transfer 1TB over USB 2.0?

This might be a completely stupid question because it is conceivably highly dependent on the respective disk speeds. But I am thinking that there is a speed cap that is specific to USB 2.0 that would by itself define a lower limit.

How long would it take to transfer 1TB of data from an external drive to an internal drive over USB 2.0?

EDIT: I originally asked the question erroneously using Tb instead of TB, sorry for the mix-up. also for the purposes I need it for there is not much difference in TiB or TB so from my perspective (if not from a correctness perspective) either works. The maths on this one made my brain hurt

Do USB or PS/2 keyboards respond faster?

Do USB or PS/2 keyboards respond faster in terms of end-to-end input latency, keystrike to character appearing on the screen?

Related:

Under either connection, is the time between keystrike to character appearing long enough to be perceptible?

Under either connection, is it possible to strike two keys in succession faster than the single-key input lag?

What's the maximum typical speed possible with a USB2.0 drive?

I'm getting only 30MB/sec between my computer and a USB drive, despite the fact that USB 2.0 supports 480Mb/sec (or 60MB/sec) transfers. (Therefore, I'm only getting half the rated speed) Is there something present in the USB standard which should result in such half apparent speeds?

Quickly Empty Trash in Mac OS X

Emptying the trash in OS X can be a long process, especially If you have lots of items (like me). This is after 5 minutes:

Is there a way to quickly empty the trash, or make the process a whole lot quicker?

Why do HDDs mostly have the same speed as 5400, 7200, 10000 RPM?

Why do hard disk drives mostly have the same speed? They are mostly 5400, 7200, 10000 RPM. Why not 6000 or 8000? Is there any reason or benefit for having those speeds?

What is ideal internet speed for remote desktop connection?

My question and situation is similar to Recommended Connection Speed for Remote Desktop question but I need a little more info.

I know that lag can be a factor in working on remote desktop. Lets ignore that. My question is about is the ideal data rate for a good remote desktop connection.

Assume that my RDP is 1080p display. I am using external monitor that is 1080p as well.

The number of pixels in 1080p are

1920 * 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels.

Each pixel uses 16bits of color (2 Byte). Thus the number of bytes used by one screen is

(2,073,600 bit ) * 2 Bytes = 4,147,200 Bytes or ~ 4MB

Since the screen is refreshed at least 10 times a second (lets assume 10 here), the refresh rate required for smooth connection would be = 4MB*10 = 40 MB/Sec

Does these numbers make sense? Does RDP uses something better than this because that is a lot of bandwidth?

Does the size of monitor at RDP end make a difference at the connection? Bigger monitor takes more bandwidth than smaller one?

Over gigabit connection, Teracopy does 31MB/s, but Windows 8 does it at ~109MB per second?

I got my brain-melting first taste of Gigabit networking today, between my 2011 MacMini and Windows 8 Pro desktop connected via Cat.5e to Linksys WRT320N(sporting dd-WRT).

After making sure that the line speed on both systems showed 1Gbps, I proceeded to copying a 2.4GB MP4 from the Mini to the Win 8 desktop (SMB sharing). Although satisfied with the 30-34 MB/s that Teracopy was showing (that was a proper step-up for me from 10 MB/s), I still was curious about this massive difference in the advertised and real-world speed.

2 hours of Google had me believing that there were other factors that resulted in less speed, SMB being one. So just for the sake of doing it, I iPerf'd both the systems and guess what that showed - around 875mbps on both systems!

I then stumbled upon this little piece of info after which I turned off Teracopy and copied the same file through Windows 8's regular copier. 109 MB/s. Molten brains :)

What exactly is causing this? And can I enable such speeds via Teracopy? I really dig the extra features that Teracopy has, will surely miss them now :D

Can I speed up cygwin's fork?

I came across a post discussing the speed of forking in Cygwin, giving an expected 'fork rate' in Windows XP of around 30-50 per-second (link)

I've got a Core 2 duo (1.79GHz) which I would expect to get comparable results, but it's only managing around 8 forks per second (and sometimes a lot fewer):

$ while (true); do date --utc; done | uniq -c
      5 Wed Apr 21 12:38:10 UTC 2010
      6 Wed Apr 21 12:38:11 UTC 2010
      1 Wed Apr 21 12:38:12 UTC 2010
      1 Wed Apr 21 12:38:13 UTC 2010
      8 Wed Apr 21 12:38:14 UTC 2010
      8 Wed Apr 21 12:38:15 UTC 2010
      6 Wed Apr 21 12:38:16 UTC 2010
      1 Wed Apr 21 12:38:18 UTC 2010
      9 Wed Apr 21 12:38:19 UTC 2010

Can you suggest anything I might be able to do to speed things up? This machine acts a lot slower in Cygwin than others I've used before which actually were a lot slower.

Update

Let my justify my question: I don't believe that having a faster fork will magically make my life better, but I believe that this benchmark is a good proxy for the performance issues I'm seeing in bash due to normal use of external executables to calculate values. I find I get a noticeable speed up on Cygwin by going through my shell start up scripts and bash-completion and trying to replace external commands with internal ones; on Linux this isn't an issue. Often, though, this isn't possible, and my PC is currently taking ~14s to start a shell with a warm cache and no load.

Why Windows right-click new is so slow?

Why most Microsoft Windows systems have a slow right-click context menu new option?

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, right-click in any blank space inside a window and choose new option. Then a list of file types available for creation will appear, but on most systems this will cost some processing time, enough to be considered slow in comparison to other right-click operations.

Is this some kind of bad Windows registry implementation, or just some crappy algorithm used in background, any guesses?

How can I slow down the framerate of a Flash game?

I am trying to play an Adobe Flash game in my browser. The only problem is that it is too fast for me. I know it would be "cheating", but I would enjoy the game more if I could play it at a slower pace.

I've tried throttling the CPU, but I don't think this approach is reliable.

How can I have my browser or the Flash plugin play the game at a slower framerate?

Standard SD card and Micro SD card with adapter; same speed?

I'm going to buy a new SD card to be used in my car's audio player. What I would like to know is, if I buy a micro SD card with adapter, will it provide the same read/write speed as a standard SD card of the same model? Does using adapter affect speed?

Why are network speeds measured in Kbits/sec instead of KBytes/sec?

Why is network throughput measured in KBits/sec? It seems like it would make more sense to have it in KBytes/sec. You'd avoid angry users, and save a lot of headache converting between the two. Is it just advertising, or what?

Why has my Mac become so slow? (And how do I start to answer that?)

Over the past few months, many things on my MacBook Pro have become unbearably slow. Often application switching or opening a new tab in Chrome will take up to 10 or 15 seconds.

Obviously, no one can tell me why my machine is slow based on just that, so this is a pre-question. What should I look into to start to figure out why my Mac has become so slow? I'm thinking of:

• Is the disk getting full? (It was, but now I have 35GB free.)
• Is the RAM filling up? (No, I've got >1.5GB free while I experience the problem.)
• Is the CPU pegged? (No, it doesn't appear to be.)
• Is I/O blocked? (Maybe, how does one tell?)
• What else?

When a Mac is running slow, what are the vitals to take, and what directions should I go in based on those readings?