Ok, I've got a server set up with 6 drives. Two are mirrored with the OS, the other 4 are 160 gig drives in a software RAID 5. There are two folders that both have around 60 gigs of data in them that need to be transfered to other machines (I'm upgrading to a real server and need to copy the data off to two other machines in order to get do this). I want to copy one folder to each of the machines but I'm wondering if adding another network card would cut down on the time to do this. I realize that it's going to take forever anyway and also realize that all the drives are still looking for parts to a single file to copy so I'm wondering if adding another network card would really make any difference at all. This is in a home built server that only has one AMD 2100+ CPU in it with a gig of ram (so I'm guessing that, that is also the main reason why it takes forever). This is more or less a question to actually know how files being transfered works. (Files are being transfered as we speak but having to do this in the future, some of us would have a better idea of how to do this better). Thanks.

Two NICs only improve the network speed if they (and the switch to which they are connected) support trunking but most of the usual NICs don't support trunking.

If you have to transfer the two folders to two different machines you can try to put in two NICs and transfer one folder through the IP of the first NIC and the other folder through the IP of the second NIC.
Maybe the software RAID 5 is too slow for feeding two streams but it could improve the copying.

(just thinking out loud)

Do you have a USB 2.0 external drive? Don't they transfer at 400MB vs. 100MB NIC, or is it 480 I forget.

Well I like your suggestion Eye-Q (Gamma, I don't have a external HD but yeah, that would have worked out a lot better-have to pick one of those up :P). The only way I can think of doing it Eye-Q's way though, would be to open up IE or any browser for that matter and then punch in the IP address to one of the cards and grab files, while punching in the other IP address on the other machine and grab the other folder off the server. How else would you dictate what IP address your using to get a file that is shared out? Just curious, I don't know how else you would do that. Just looking through Network Neighborhood and navigating to the server won't do that unless I'm missing something there.

If you have an extra ATA or SATA connector on the machine maybe you could slave the drive in the old machine and transfer the files that way.

Well fixed my problem. Bought two gigabit Nic cards (one had one built into it already) and a 5 port gigabit swith for about a 115$ for all three. Thanks for the suggestions guys.