I have several computers I move massive amounts of media in between, 30gb to 40gb at times.  Two are on the same network and two are not.

I started looking at external hdd's and noticed that the eSATA ones are a bit pricey.  I don't want to go USB because of the speed factor.  So what I am looking at doing is buying a couple of eSATA hdd enclosures and a couple of 100gb or so hdd's.  I will also need to buy two eSATA controller cars for the two pc's without it built in to the motherboard.

I have shopped around on newegg and have found many options, most of them are from companies I have never heard of and have very spotty reviews.

What I am looking for is some advice/knowledge from anyone who has a setup similar, or anyone who can point me in a good direction as to what components might be good.

Thanks- IZZMAN

gigabit switch

2 gigabit nics

these two would require an upgrade in cabling as well

Quoted: gigabit switch 2 gigabit nics these two would require an upgrade in cabling as well

You might want to avoid that switch since you say you're doing large transfers because it doesn't say that it supports 9,000 byte frames.  This cheaper one from NetGear does:

www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833122128

I have six of them, and they work very well even with jumbo packets.

I'd also avoid low quality network cards.  I've wasted days of time tracking down problems on Ethernet networks due to cards from D-Link, Linksys, RealTek, and so on.  This one from Intel:

www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833106121

is only $30.  There's no reason to buy low quality to just save $5.z

Quoted: gigabit switch 2 gigabit nics these two would require an upgrade in cabling as well

Thanks for the help guys, I thought about going that route.  I currently have cat5E run throughout my house.  What kind of cable would I need to get?, I know there are several different types.  Also, the mobo on one of the PC's is an  ASUS P5N SLI-32 deluxe and already has two giga ethernet ports in the back.

I know home depot sells several types of 8 wire cable, or should I buy online?

buy it where ever is cheaper

link

Quoted: buy it where ever is cheaper link

excellent link!

Thanks again, that pretty much tells me what I need.

Quoted: So what are jumbo frames?  I thought ethernet was based on a 1500byte packet....

Ethernet was, but some of the new, nicer gigabit equipment supports larger packets.
With large files and older computers, the jumbo packets can really make a huge difference.  For us, it decreased the time our backups took by almost 25% on a set of four backup systems because their seven year-old CPU's were already being used 100% for compression and Reed-Solomon parity calculations.

Do gig nics send in larger frames by default, and some switches dont handle that?

As far as I know, the switches always support them by default.  I haven't seen one where you had to do something to enable jumbo packet support.

The cards don't do it by default.  With Linux it is easy to set the MTU.  You simply type "ifconfig eth0 mtu 9000".  With Windows it is much harder.  You usually have to enable jumbo frames with the driver under Device Mangler.  Then you have to change the MTU in a separate place.  Windows gets the math wrong so while you setup good systems to 9000 byte MTU, you have to use 9014 bytes with Windows because Microsoft includes the size of the IP headers in addition to the data when they shouldn't.  I've done it with three different gigabit cards, and the procedure was different for each one.  As usual, Windows is very inconsistent.z