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.

(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.

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.