How fast is …

Housekeeping:

For consistency, I’ll track everything in Mb/s (being one million bits per second).
I’ll distinguish between NOMINAL speeds (which you never achieve due to overheads) and ACTUAL “usable to shift my data” speeds.

And some notes on technology:

Wifi: is half-duplex on a given frequency/channel; needs to do “listen then transmit” on each frame for collision avoidance; freq range for channels on 2.4GHz overlap whereas 5GHz do not overlap; unlicensed 2.4GHz is more congested than 5GHz but suffers less attenuation due to walls etc.
I’ll look at Wifi (through walls!), wired ethernet, spinning HDD and SSDs, USB2+3 -

Speeds: fastest to slowest

32000 Mb/s: PCIe 3.0 x4
10000 Mb/s: ETHERNET/NOMINAL for 10GbE ethernet ports
7040 Mb/s: SSD/ACTUAL Read from SSD at 880MB/s connected via NVMe/PCIe 3.0 x4 (4GB/s)
6000 Mb/s: SATA3/NOMINAL (but note: spinning hdd will bottleneck at about 1040MB/s)
5000 Mb/s: USB3/NOMINAL
1300 Mb/s: WIFI/NOMINAL 802.11 AC1300 (being 400Mb/s from 2.4GHz plus 867Mb/s from 5GHz)
1040 Mb/s: HDD/ACTUAL from spinning disk
1000 Mb/s: ETHERNET/NOMINAL for GbE ethernet ports.
1000 Mb/s: WIFI/ACTUAL what eero claim as ‘up to’ speed for ‘eero Pro 6’
866 Mb/s: WIFI/NOMINAL 802.11ac wav1 (2013 era, relabelled “Wifi5”)
680 Mb/s: USB3/ACTUAL reading from a Samsung 64GB flash drive (85MB/s)
500 Mb/s: WIFI/ACTUAL what eero claim as ‘up to’ speed for “eero 6”
480 Mb/s: USB2/NOMINAL
450 Mb/s: WIFI/NOMINAL 802.11n (2009 era)
350 Mb/s: WIFI/ACTUAL what eero claim as “up to” speed for “eero” : https://eero.com/shop/eero
300 Mb/s: WIFI/ACTUAL Fastest speed I’ve seen eero wifi go. (38MB/s)
272 Mb/s: USB2/ACTUAL Observed write speed of 34MB/s to SATA HDD via USB2 caddy
110 Mb/s: WIFI/ACTUAL Fastest speed I’ve seen eero wifi go through 1 stone wall.(=14MB/s)
100 Mb/s: Low-end broadband connection
80 Mb/s: WIFI/ACTUAL Fastest speed I’ve seen eero wifi go through 2 stone walls (=10MB/s)
54 Mb/s: WIFI/NOMINAL 802.11g (2003 era)
45 Mb/s: 3840x2160p aka 4K video, 30fps
16 Mb/s: 2560x1440p aka 2K video, 30fps
8 Mb/s: 1920x1080p video, 30fps
4 Mb/s: 1280x720p video, 30fps

Here is the same data, but this time grouped by technology:

Inside your computer:

32000 Mb/s: PCIe 3.0 x4
7040 Mb/s: SSD/ACTUAL Read from SSD at 880MB/s connected via NVMe/PCIe 3.0 x4 (4GB/s)
6000 Mb/s: SATA3/NOMINAL (but note: spinning hdd will bottleneck at about 1040MB/s)
1040 Mb/s: HDD/ACTUAL from spinning disk

Wired LAN:

Wifi LAN:

1300 Mb/s: WIFI/NOMINAL 802.11 AC1300 (being 400Mb/s from 2.4GHz plus 867Mb/s from 5GHz)
1000 Mb/s: WIFI/ACTUAL what eero claim as ‘up to’ speed for ‘eero Pro 6’
866 Mb/s: WIFI/NOMINAL 802.11ac wav1 (2013 era, relabelled “Wifi5”)
500 Mb/s: WIFI/ACTUAL what eero claim as ‘up to’ speed for “eero 6”
450 Mb/s: WIFI/NOMINAL 802.11n (2009 era)
350 Mb/s: WIFI/ACTUAL what eero claim as “up to” speed for “eero” : https://eero.com/shop/eero
300 Mb/s: WIFI/ACTUAL Fastest speed I’ve seen eero wifi go. (38MB/s)
110 Mb/s: WIFI/ACTUAL Fastest speed I’ve seen eero wifi go through 1 stone wall.(=14MB/s)
80 Mb/s: WIFI/ACTUAL Fastest speed I’ve seen eero wifi go through 2 stone walls (=10MB/s)
54 Mb/s: WIFI/NOMINAL 802.11g (2003 era)

Broadband connections:

USBs:

Data/content: