Fastest way to share a hard drive?

[pmazolo]

I just hired an assistant, and need to set up a good working environment for us, accessing the same data. Right now I have the data stored on RAID drives in my desktop computer, and share those on the network. At the moment its 1000baseT but I still find its slow for acessing large volumes of RAW files...  Is there anyway to get near the speed of a local eSATA drive for the assistant?

Any other fast/good solutions? Would a dedicated NAS on the network be faster than sharing out the RAID 10 drives in my computer?

[John.Murray]

short of a SAN (storage area network), your pretty much sharing as fast as possible.  Some things to check:

Your network switch; is it properly supporting full duplex?
Your local area network adapters; try manually configuring them at highest possible speed at full duplex, then test connectivity

[bartsgb]

I would consider buying a few parts and creating a local server for your data. This would benefit your assistant and you will also have a backup. A good places to look for cheap parts/a system would be E-bay i reckon.