Until quite recently, upgrading from gigabit meant a rather hefty investment in 10GbE (10-gigabit-per-second ethernet) equipment. Note that there are 8 bits (the small “b” in gigabit) in a byte (the capital “B” in megabyte) so bit speeds are 1/8th byte speeds. In short, it’s the last remaining bottleneck in your computing experience but it’s easy to fix-upgrade to multi-gig. Your garden variety gigabit 1Gbps ethernet delivers only 120MBps transfers (about the speed of an older USB hard drive) and slow seeks. Depending on how heavily you use it, it’s your network. Basically, computing lag due to slow storage has disappeared. External USB SSDs regularly top 500MBps, and even the sustained throughput of conventional hard drives has jumped from 125MBps to 250MBps. SATA 6Gbps SSDs, then 2- to 4GBps NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express). And over the ensuing decade, computer storage mechanisms have grown dramatically faster. Truth be known, CPUs stopped being a bottleneck to your computing experience ten years ago.
