Thanks for your responses so far... Okay then: http://tigersden.co.uk/data.html The "ftp server" used was pureftpd The 128M file was created with : dd if=/dev/urandom of=./128MB.img bs=1k count=131072 The SMB/NFS filesystems were unmounted then remounted before each test. What approximate speeds should I expect from a 100Mbs duplex network? The main problem I have is that I just simply do not know what the transfer rate *should* be? I tried some maths: 100Mbs duplex is 200Mbits/s signalling rate. 8 bits = 1 byte, so a signalling rate of 25MBytes/s assuming 50% of the information is ethernet "junk" [I have no idea about the actual proportions, but it seemed like that would be excessive enough to give a good enough ball park figure ;o)] then thats about a 12 MByte/sec transfer rate. 6 times faster than I have now. Am I missing something on the calculation, or am I right there? The network cables are no longer than 2 meters each between the computers and the switch. The network cards do not share their IRQs with any other devices [see html file above]. Switch shows Link/Act, 100M, FDX lights for both computers. Thanks!