That's something you can do with firewire as well. Just share the volume.

Ethernet's advantage comes when using a computer (like the empeg). When using a portable hard drive (like most of the portable players), the best solution is the fastest and most direct. In this case, Firewire. You plug it in and that's it. No special software to assign/locate addresses needed. If you did use special software, then you could also do communications and control in addition to the normal mass-storage functions. 1394 is designed for this type of thing.

I think I know why backwards PC manufacturers haven't been so quick to adopt 1394 now. Or USB2 (and why they took so long with 1.0). Of course it's the same reason so many don't have 100baseTX or 1000baseTX standard either.

Bruno