Thanks. I've seen:

* Mac wireless to router to router USB port to HD - 600kB/s
* Mac ethernet to router to router USB port to HD - 1.5Mb/s
* Mac ethernet to router to laptop by ethernet to HD (connected to laptop) - 11Mb/s!

So it looks like the router's USB port is very much the bottleneck here (as a couple of people mentioned yesterday)

Transferring 200GB from the Mac is now going to take about 5 hours instead of 4 days!

I have now installed a graphics editing program on the XHDD - whilst it was connected to the Vista Tower - no problems apart from changing the HDD from the default C:\ to J:\

Moved the XHDD back on to the 4-way USB Adaptor, in turn connected to the Bright Box USB port.

All three PCs successfully accessed and ran the graphics program on that remote disk, including minor edits to some JPG files.

The program adjusted to the different screen sizes etc.

Interesting possibilities!

In reply to a post by bigalxyz123:

* Mac ethernet to router to laptop by ethernet to HD (connected to laptop) - 11Mb/s!

Yes this an expected transfer rate if either / both the Mac or Windows laptop have a 100M (aka fast ethernet) network card. If they both had gigabit ports you would expect rates up to 3 times faster (limited by USB 2).

The rate when on on the router USB port is an order of magnitude slower than I expected
which makes me wonder if the router is not getting the port into USB 2 mode - the rate is closer to USB 1.x.

Does the external drive have its own power supply or is it powered by the USB connector? (as the router is unlikely to have significant spare power to supply over USB).

Thanks - yes, external drive plugs into the mains, so it doesn't rely on the router for its power.