I avoided mentioning the Terastation b/c of the poster's <$300 stipulation. I've got two of them at the office. The gigabit ethernet is fantastic, and I think they're by far the price/performance leader if you're not into rolling your own. I use them for daily on-site warm backup and cross-wireless-bridge weekly offsite backups.

I don't use them for live file use, so I can't really comment about speed, but the few times I've needed yesterday's file back it's blinding fast (reads).

They're good looking and very quiet.

-Zeke