I would like to add something here for people having the same problem as the original author of this thread. I dont see why a NAS is neccessarily slow. It depends on the hardware and personally I have this one: http://www.intel.com/design/servers/storage/ss4200/ In some reviews it scored transfer speeds of up to 40 Mb/s. While that isnt much and not even close to theoretical (100 Mb/s) and practical (70 - 80 Mb/s) limits in a gigabit network, it seems to be decent. currently it is running on FreeBSD with a ZFS mirror setup of 2 320 GB Enterprise SATA HDDs. Transferring a file of 2GB, which is definitely bigger than the system RAM, over FTP i got 9 Mb/s when the client was on 100 MB/s Ethernet. Then I tried gigabit ethernet, as both the NAS and my client PC have it. Result: 15 Mb/s FTP. Since the NAS system itself has scored better in reviews on tomshardware and other sites, I guess I have some sort of bottleneck. I am suspecting my clients 2.5" hdd here.