How much data is generated in continuous mode?

[slideomix]

I am trying to setup a continuous voltage measurement using a PCI-6071E card. I've looked at some of the samples (ContAcqVoltageSamples_IntClk_ToFile) which uses the AnalogMultiChannelReader to asynchronously collect the data and write it out to a file. My question is, if I am doing 2000 samples per second with 200 samples per channel, how much data is going to be generated? Will using compression really make a large difference in the amount of data I have to deal with? I want to graph the data "real-time" in some circumstances, but generally it's all about saving the file off for post-processing by another application. My tests may be running for several minutes. I looked at the compressed data stuff, and I didn't understand how I could read the data back and understand what data goes to what channels and how much data belongs to each channel and each time slice. Thanks

[CWolf · Accepted solution]

How many channels are you reading from?  The samples per second is what will tell you how much data you are producing.  Multiply this by the number of channels and you will get the total number of samples per secon of data being generated.  (The samples per channel just determines the buffer size in a continuous acquisition, so it is not used to determine the total amount of data being generated.)  Each sample will take 2 Bytes, so the total amount of data will be 2*2000*Number of Channels*Number of Seconds that your test runs for. Based on your description, it doesn't sound like compression is really necessary; just save your files to whatever format your other program can read (tab delimited text files, or some other common format), and don't worry about compression unless your file sizes become prohibitive.

-Christina