9 March 2021

Unit 1.4. Computer performance

High performance computers typically involve one or more of the following factors:
 Short response time for a given piece of work.
 High throughput which refers to the rate of processing work.
 Low utilisation of computing resource(s).
 High availability of the computing system or application.
 Fast (or highly compact) data compression and decompression.
 High bandwidth.
 Short data transmission time.
Storage speed is especially important in five situations:
 When opening a program or opening a large data file, at which point all the data needs
to be transferred from your storage device to your RAM.
 When loading your operating system, since all your operating system’s data and
processes need to be loaded into your RAM.
 9 March 2021
 Installing large applications on a storage device, since the new files need to be created
on the storage device.
 When storing large amounts of data on a storage device (such as saving a large video
to hard drive).
 When transferring data between two storage devices (such as copying files from one
drive to another).