Do you use fast or gigabit ethernet on your home/biz network?
 

I've upgraded to fastethernet (100Mbit/sec) and installed Samba so that I can back up directly from my XP box to my server, but it's pretty slow! The maximum speed is about 6Mbytes/sec, and it slows down other network activity from the comp like web browsing... I guess it's near completely saturated.

Anyone here use gigabit ether? (1000Mbit/sec). I'm pretty sure my server and drive are not the bottleneck in this case... perhaps a couple of gigabit cards and a crossover cable would do the trick. :)

I use it and it's much better than 100 Mb, but the harddrive is the major bottleneck at this point.

Or an external firewire drive.

Yeah, I'm not expecting to leap up to 60Mbytes/sec by moving to gigabit... but 15-20Mbytes/sec or higher would be good. gigabit also leaves plenty of headroom for other packets to squeeze through the network when I'm running a full backup session. Hmm, speaking of full backups, I have 200Gb+ on this workstation. I'm not sure whether I should even bother trying with only 100Mbit ether. :)

Sounds like you have a sped/duplex issue, check your nic settings and if they are not 100/FD there is your issue

If you are using a hub and not a switch then you will have that problem. You are utilizing about 48mbps on your connection device between computers. That should not effect a 3 mbps cable connection. You also may be killing your work stations i/o performance (hard drive). What type of cpu and what hard drive specs are in your computer.

Upgrading to gigabit copper will not help you at this point since you are not even utilizing a fast ethernet adapter. 6M Bytes * 8 = 48 Mbits per second. Your nic card is capable of about 12.5 MegaBytes per second of data transfer.