LaCie makes storage devices primarily for small business and home business to use as backup systems to computer hard drives. Recently a proposal was submitted to senior management to make changes to the current design of the company’s most popular storage model, the LaCie Model B77, which accounted for 54% of the company’s total revenue of $31.5M in 2009. The proposed change is expected to bring about a 68% increase in input/output (I/O) speeds for the device from the current 312MB/sec transfer rate — though 21% of the proposed data rate increase will be lost to added overhead data management. For large file transfers this will be a major data transfer time improvement over their current model, however, Marketing is excited about this proposed design improvement and has already started telling many of LaCie customers about this improvement to come in the I/O. Senior management is also excited, in particular Jack Oliver, the VP of the Project Management Office for LaCie. Jim Dulling is very interested as well. Jim is a functional manager, reporting to Oliver.

The LaCie Company has a project proposed for $1.7M

1. Calculate some numbers: (Numbers)

a. What will be the user I/O data rate improvement: