NetTools

Data Transfer Rate Calculator

Benchmark an actual backup, migration, or copy job's real throughput.

Data transferred (GB)

Time elapsed (s)

Transfer rate (GB/s)

0.833

Useful for benchmarking a backup, migration, or file copy job's actual throughput.

What you entered

Data transferred (GB): 50Time elapsed (s): 60

1
Rate = data size ÷ time
50 GB ÷ 60 s= 0.8333 GB/s

Result

Transfer rate (GB/s): 0.833

Moving 50 GB in 60s is a transfer rate of 0.8333333333333334 GB/s.

Transfer rate from volume moved and time taken

Throughput is data volume divided by elapsed time, expressed in gigabytes per second.

Data moved	Time taken	Rate
1 GB	10 s	0.1000 GB/s
1 GB	60 s	0.0167 GB/s
10 GB	60 s	0.1667 GB/s
100 GB	3,600 s	0.0278 GB/s
500 GB	3,600 s	0.1389 GB/s

Multiply gigabytes per second by 8 to compare against a network link advertised in gigabits: 0.1 GB/s is roughly 800 Mbps.

Useful for benchmarking real-world jobs

This is a simple after-the-fact calculation — time an actual backup or file copy, plug in the numbers, and you get a real throughput figure to compare against a drive's or network's rated speed.

Bottlenecks aren't always where you'd expect

A slow transfer can be bottlenecked by the source disk, destination disk, network, or CPU (for encryption/compression) — a lower-than-expected rate here is a starting point for investigation, not a diagnosis on its own.

Frequently asked questions

My backup copied 500 GB in 3 hours — is that fast?

That's about 46 MB/s (370 Mbps). For a USB 3.0 drive (rated ~625 MB/s) it's slow — likely bottlenecked by small files or the drive's write cache. For a network backup over a 1 Gbps link, 370 Mbps is reasonable after protocol overhead.

How do I benchmark my actual transfer speed?

Copy a large single file (not many small ones) between source and destination, time it, and enter the numbers here. Small files add per-file overhead that dramatically lowers measured throughput compared to sequential large-file transfer.

What's a good transfer rate for a local network backup?

On a 1 Gbps Ethernet connection, expect 80-110 MB/s for large sequential files. On 10 Gbps, expect 500-1,000 MB/s. NAS devices and older drives may bottleneck well below the network's rated speed.