HDD Bottlenecking Interwebz speeds?

[Culbrelai]

So, this is kind of a hypothetical.

Most platter HDDs I've had/seen benchmarked have sequential read/writes of ~155 mb/s read/write.

If one had an ISP with a download/upload speed exceeding that, what would happen if you tried to download to that drive? Would it bottleneck the download? My guess would be no, due to many servers having gigabit/fiber ethernet and many platter drives...

 

[EarthDog]

HDD's are around 155MB/s not mb/s (remember that HDD speed slows as it gets closer into the middle writing data too!). BIG difference there.

150 MB/s is 1.2 Gbps. That would saturate a Gb NIC (maxes out around 123 MB/s), so in this case, it would be the network card bottlenecking it. Assuming you had a 10GB NIC and well over 1.2Gbps bandwidth (Side note - a 6TB WD Caviar BLack averages 177MB/s writes, low 104MB/s), the drive then would be the bottleneck.