Data Alphabet Soup
Data Alphabet Soup My last post started with a panicked call about a flash drive. As I worked through it, I realized there was a lot of detail I needed to put on the back burner. One of the significant points I glossed over was the concept of SD card speeds. The difficulty of that discussion lies in the alphabet soup of the transmission and storage of data. In this post, I want to try to answer questions like "How fast is fast enough" or "How big a drive do I need?" The first step of that is to get a clear picture of how we talk about data. In an earlier post on networking, I discussed bits and bytes. Let's begin with a quick review of that. The most basic math in the digital world is that it takes 8 bits to make a single byte. It is also worth being aware of the concept of a "word," which is simply the fixed size of a data unit for a specific system—such as the 24-bit word of an audio sample or a 64-bit word in modern computing. Regardless of the wor...