Rest assured that it's in order for things like FSB and HDD bandwidth to influence download speed, your system would be in a very bad condition. You're talking about data rates of less than 1 MB/s, where as most of your internal components will be transferring at 100s of MB/s.

A speed of 100 kBps for a 1 Mb connection is acceptable. Internationally, I'd be lucky to pull 300 kBps with my 3.5 Mb connection. You confusion stems from grammatical convention, and how people crap all over it. Technically, bits always get a lower case b, where as bytes should get an uppercase B. Furthermore, the Si measurement kilo should always get a lowercase k, where as Mega and beyond get uppercase.



512 b
64 B
256 kb
32 kB
100 Mb
12.5 MB

bits - rarely if ever used in the context of internet bandwidth
Bytes - used when describing a really bad connection to a Russian or Chinese website: "Dude! I'm only pulling 900 byte/s "
kilobits - standard measurement of internet connection bandwidth
kilobytes - standard measurement of download speeds
Megabits - measurement of high speed internet connections (although 100 Mb is a pipe dream for many)
Megabytes - rarely used in the context of internet bandwidth, except in file size or commercial connections of 8Mb and above.


You get the idea. People break these rules all the time, in the same way they ignore grammar. I urge you not to. You CAN make a difference!