You could put some cheesse-ball 10/100 ethernet card in your filer. But do you really expect to be able to get decent performance out of it? Tell me there is no difference between a $30 Netgear 10/100 card and the $200 Zynx that NetApp uses (or used to use).

As long as they both use the same Digital 21140 Ethernet controller, I expect basically the same performance. My ttcp measurements seem to bear this out.

I'm not saying that the controller is the only interesting part of an Ethernet card - just saying that even inexpensive Ethernet cards can have excellent performance.

(Btw, Netgear has recently changed to a different Ethernet controller.)

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no