Does anyone have any real world data transfer figures (minus the overheads)?

In 1.0/1.01 Ethernet runs at about 400KBytes/sec for smallish files under ideal conditions (crossover cable). This falls to more like 150-200KBytes/sec on large (>15M) files due to a player bug, since fixed. USB goes no faster.

1.1 will do more like 500KBytes/sec over both USB and Ethernet from Windows, 700KBytes/sec over Ethernet through a 10/100 switch from Linux, and 800KBytes/sec over Ethernet through a crossover cable from Linux.

The memory-to-disk bandwidth is about 4Mbytes/sec. The empeg has been clocked at 1135KBytes/sec in through Ethernet and into memory, an astonishing 97% of back-to-back saturation wire speed. Then the kernel fell over

It's trying to do both disk I/O and network I/O at the same time that slows things down to 800Kbytes/sec. The only way to avoid that would be to put both disk and Ethernet on PCI, which would colossally increase the complexity (and thus price) of the player.

Peter