"Thanks for your clarifications, I didn't realise that the classification was a minimum, this makes a lot more sense. I'm fairly sure USB2 only gives you 60MB/s at burst, and the effective throughput is much less (maybe 35MB/s?). I agree, it sounds achievable. But there's plenty of overhead and not a lot of breathing space. You're also probably going to peg the CPU as it manages all of those packets. This may not apply so much on the new distributions. I think I'll settle this by trying out my Raspberry Pi with an external SATA enclosure, set it up as a file server, and see what kind of performance I get out of it. It might be that what I consider 'reasonable' as a file server is not what others consider reasonable, perhaps I have higher standards! For the record, I did a quick benchmark with the new Raspbian distribution, and it hit values much closer to my MacBook benchmark, which is good! :)" - Jalada