I generally dislike using Windows drag-and-drop file transfers to evaluate product performance because it's such a black box with large overhead that produces widely varying results. But I didn't really have much choice given the nature of the product.

My test client was a 2.4GHz Pentium 4, running WinXP Home with 512MB RAM and Realtek RTL8139 10/100 PCI Ethernet. The NetDisk was connected to my LAN's 10/100 switch operating in full duplex mode.

I used a folders each containing the same 54.4MB of assorted gif and jpg files and used a stopwatch to time the transfers from the time I dropped the file until the file transfer progress bar disappeared. No other applications were running on the client. Each test was run three times and I deleted the transferred folder and emptied the Trash after each run. Table 1 shows the averaged results from my test runs.

Although the numbers seem to give a slight performance edge to the USB 2.0 mode, I think they're within the range of variation of the drag-and-drop measurement technique. Basically, you can choose Ethernet or USB2.0 connection without worrying about slowing your transfer speed.