I have a number of systems wired locally with switches and hubs.  I would
like to be able to do more backups from these systems to a stand alone
backup system with a couple of large hard drives.  The issue then becomes
data transfer speeds because a couple of these systems have 100-200 GB of
data stored on them.

The typical data transfer speeds have been on the order of 2-3 MB/sec when
all network cards are 10/100 MB NICs.

There are a number of online resources listed below on how to "tune" one's
machines to get faster data transfers.  Has anyone out there "tuned" their
LAN in order to get decent data transfer speeds?  Do these suggested changes
truly move the transfer speeds up drastically?  I realize there will be
collisions, etc. ... but I would guess that I SHOULD be able to get transfer
rates up to 25-50 MB/sec.  Does that seem reasonable?

Or ... would I get better data transfer rates by mounting the drives with
NFS on a Linux box and copying everything via NFS over TCP?

Any of your experiences would be greatly appreciated.  Many thanks in
advance.

http://rdweb.cns.vt.edu/public/notes/win2k-tcpip.htm
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/169789/
http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/tcptune/#Linux

... or NFS related information ...

http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/performance.html

... for gigabit networks ....

http://datatag.web.cern.ch/datatag/howto/tcp.html




Randy