Technical data

Data Acquisition 4
Estimate of worklist file size
Agilent 6200 Series TOF and 6500 Series Q-TOF LC/MS System Concepts Guide 117
Storage of method parameters for each run also affects file size
but to a lesser degree than the file size of the spectrum. They
take up about 10,000 bytes before sample injection starts. For a
10-sample worklist, they take up less than 0.1 MB.
Approximate file size for Centroid data
Data is not stored as the abundance at evenly spaced ion flight
times. Rather, peak centroids are computed first. Each data
point is stored as a pair of values of mass and abundance. The
data storage required is 12 bytes per detected peak in the
spectrum. The number of peaks detected is dependent on the
number of compound peaks in the spectrum as well as the noise
in the background and the threshold set.
If the mass range is set as 250 to 3000 and the threshold is
appropriate, about 3000 to 5000 peaks are detected in one
spectrum. If the scans/sec. is 1, the run time 5 minutes, and ten
samples are in the worklist, then the disk space needed for
these samples is between 102 and 172.5 MB.
If you have a 2 GHz instrument, the disk space needed for these
samples is between 204 and 345 MB. If you have a 4 GHz
instrument, the disk space needed for these sample is between
408 and 690 MB.
Spectrum metadata and method parameters are also stored
with centroid data and comprise a greater percent of the file
size than with Profile data.