question about transfer rate

[montelee]

I am thinking about getting a Glyph external drive to use with Pro Tools on my iMac. On the Glyph website, they list their GT050 FW400 drive as having a maximum transfer rate of 50MBsec (400Mb/sec). Pardon my ignorance,but I find their units slightly confusing-by 50MB/sec do they mean 50 megabytes/sec and by 400Mb/sec do they mean 400 megabits/sec? As you can tell, I am new to the arena of external drives-if someone would just confirm my guess about this, I would appreciate it. Thanks.

[DigiTechSupt]

That is correct. There are 8 megabits per megabyte, so 400 (megabits) divided by 8 (bits per byte) = 50 (megabytes).

[Craig F]

it's a numbers game by marketing
400 Mb/s sounds faster than 50 MB/s to someone that does not know the difference

so we were using SCSI 160 (160MB/s) if not SCSI 320 when FW400 (400Mb/s) came out and people (producers mostly) thought Firewire was faster

[montelee]

Thanks, guys! That's what I thought, but I needed to be sure. Now that I know what they are really saying, I can make an informed decision.