Well, just a tidbit for you guys. Those cheap residental 100Mbit switches and hubs usually will only thruput 5-8 Mbps. Steping up to comercial equiptment really increases your networking speed. Our main switch has a 128Gbps backplane, and the stepdown switches we use on some equiptment is 24 port with 4Gbps backplane.

On a normal residential or small office gear, transfering files can saturate the network. Check out ebay, and look for some lucent or cisco gear. Usually, 200-500 bucks will get you a nice switch that you can really push traffic on.

Most people will see a HUGE increase in just using better equiptment. I would say take this route before going gigabit, because your not even getting 100Mbps out of most equiptment.

Also, intel and industry standard for gigabit is any device capible of sustained transfers of over 100 Mbps. So, you will see some cheap gigabit gear that will barely break 100Mbps.