Hi all,
First take a good look at my home setup, particularly the data flow between the computer tagged simply as "PC", and the external hard drives hooked to the Time Capsule via a USB hub: http://gallery.me.com/mommybabou#100028/MyHomeSetup&bgcolor=black
Yeah, you saw that right! My current setup works pretty well, but there is one thing I would like to optimize: file transfers between the various computers. I mentioned looking at the "PC" and the external drives because that's where the bulk of the transfers happens.
I don't think there's anything that can be done for the wireless devices (dotted lines), but surely there is for the wired ones. I think the weakest link in there is the WRT54GL Linksys router. The network ports on that router, IIRC, is max 100Mbps (or about 10MB/s). My PC has gigabit network, the Time Capsule has gigabit network, and the USB hub should be able to support up to 40MB/s (that would be a weak link as well, but not the weakest). So right now, I only reach around 10MB/s. I can only hook up the external drives to the USB port of the Time Capsule (a shame, really, but my external drives only have USB anyway...), so I would say the max I could potentially reach is that 40MB/s. Sounds like not that much, but that would actually be 4 times faster than what I have now.
So, I was wondering if I could put a Network Hub that supports gigabit network on the Linksys router (like this one for example). I would then connect the three devices (that are currently wired to the Linksys) on that hub. Also, I was wondering if the setup for that was easy. I have never used a network hub before, so I don't know how they work... And even though my network seems complex, it was relatively painless to set up, so I'm not too technical about all of this.
Any opinion or suggestion would be appreciated. Thanks for reading...