Fastest Network Storage Connection

If you want top access via the network, you may be limited by the speed of (and any sharing on) your network. If you have Gb Ethernet (perfectly feasible over cat5 if the distances are not too great), the network will in principle be capable transfer rate to USB2.0 and fire-wire interfaces (assuming that the network is not busy). In principle, even "fast" 100-Mb Ethernet is barely slower than the 150-Mb/s internal peak data rates of most HDDs - but whichever Ethernet you use, it will always add to the latency.

many people don't understand the difference between MB and Mb. if there is a small B divide by 8.

A disk drive that interfaces the network is called a "Server." Sorry about that, but there are few protocols that will interface a disk drive with the network without a PC or switch involved. Yet you might try this...

There is, I believe an Ethernet spec being created for SCSI over non-blocking Ethernet coming up - or it's really new. Try searching the RFC sites.

It's not necessarily a server. A server is autonomous. Because Ethernet is sequential you can have a pretty-much dumb disc* behind an Ethernet interface. However, the most common application of a (relatively) bare disc is probably back-up, in which case the disc will have intelligence - but still not act as a server (and definitely not as a PC - no display, keyboard, etc). These are simply called NetworkAttachedStorage, or NAS. "Integrated" low cost suppliers include Western Digital, LaCie, Iomega, Freecom

*Minimal additional intelligence compared with a USB disc

Not true anymore. The modern data center uses large server clusters to run apps on, where PCs act as individual clients. The servers can run in parallel because of InfiniBand, which provides (through PCI Express) very high speed RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) between servers. From there, the servers are usually connected to large RAID arrays through Fiber Channel networks. It is not uncommon to find switches that support Ethernet, Fiber Channel, and InfiniBand to bring it all together.

Different definition of autonomous.

Maybe, but that's how the data center is shaking out in the real world!

Google NAS.

There are lots of product out there. From single drive to RAID enclosure. Fastest speed is Gigabit.

I have one on 100Mb network. It took about 15min to copy 4GB. It is still fast enough to play video file off the NAS.

Pineapple

That's an average write speed of 32-Mb/s. Assuming that there is no other traffic, you should be able to see rather more than that over the network. It may be that the system is set up so that the final chacking is performed at your local computer. If so, the read speed will be quicker, and it may be possible to write quicker using correction of the networked data and local checking (assuming that the disc itself is fast enough...)

Checkout http://www.iocellshop.com.

They have some of the fasted directly attached network devices in the world.

We're running 10 Gigabit non-blocking.