That's fast

How fast is the new Intel Thunderbolt peripheral bus? Let's crunch the numbers.

Western Digital announced a new 6TB drive recently, which is roughly 1748 HOURS of high quality HD video from Netflix, Hulu, or one of the other streaming companies. To be clear, this is their highest quality offering currently, and you could record 73 DAYS of it.

So. How quick can we fill our disk under perfect conditions? What if I just wanted to fill every single nook and cranny of this behemoth? Below, I've listed some popular computer peripheral connections and how long it would take them. In short, Thunderbolt is the clear winner!

Bus	Speed (MB/sec)	Time
USB 1.1	1.5	48d 13h 5m 4.00s
FireWire 400	49.152	1d 11h 33m 20.00s
USB 2	60	1d 5h 7m 37.60s
FireWire 800	98.304	0d 17h 46m 40.00s
SATA 1G	150	0d 11h 39m 3.04s
SATA 3G	300	0d 5h 49m 31.52s
SATA 6G	600	0d 2h 54m 45.76s
USB 3	625	0d 2h 47m 46.33s
Thunderbolt	1250	0d 1h 23m 53.16s