Having USB host capability in the empeg would be fun, but there's no way it could achieve significantly better performance than the existing interfaces -- we're local-bus limited there.

SATA over USB could be made to work, but would be dreadfully slow with the extra layers of hardware/software stacks.

And then there's the problem of our 2.2.xx kernel, which lacks USB drivers galore.

Still, I'd like my empeg to have a host port or two.

For faster networking -- at the time of the empeg design, there were no suitable (non-PCI) 100mb/s ethernet chips available, which is how we ended up with 10mb/s only.

But now, there *are* 100mb/s chips that don't need a PCI bus. One of these could be grafted into an empeg without too much rework required. Throughput wouldn't be 100mb/s, though, as the local-bus interface would limit things to much less than that.

Figure that our hard disks use the fastest existing interface, at full bus speed, and they max out somewhere around 2.1MB/sec. If we could get 100mb/s ethernet working at a similar interface rate, that might give us 16-17mb/sec network throughput. As robricc said, even that "mere" 60-70% improvement could still be worthwhile.

EDIT: Note also, that the IDE, USB, and ethernet all share compete for the same local bus. So if one is, say, uploading tunes over ethernet, that bus bandwidth will be split between networking and IDE.

Cheers