Gigabit Ethernet
Why?
That's a good question.
To replicate some 50GB of ape, jpg and avi files + the small amount of real stuff (my finances, stocks and IT project stuff) from pc1 to pc2 in case that pc1 or the data disk run havoc. Really fast! Much better than Raid 1! If you are really paranoid you can keep as many back copies of changes as you want if you have the needed disk space and use alternate backup disks in a case.
About Raid 1: Never happened to you that the Raid controller itself blew up?
How fast can a hard drive read\write data? File transfer is only as fast as the slowest component in the chain...
If I remember correctly, Ultra-ATA architecture provides for a maximum of 133 MB/s. SATA has been introducted at 150 MB/s and promises to reach 600 MB/s. But real-world performance is significantly less. Ultra-ATA, even with RAID, maxes out around 40 MB/s. I've heard of users reporting SATA performance of around 65 MB/s. This, oddly enough, is pretty close to what SATA drives claim as maximum throughput.
100 Mbps Ethernet is only 12.5 MB/s, assuming no collisions or overhead. So Gigabit ethernet should offer definate improvements. I'm pretty sure the 802.3 group is working on 10 GBps ethernet, so stand by!
Scott-