I bought this switch to set between my PCs, my D-Link DNS323 and my network printer. It's lightning fast! What's great about this switch is that you can use regular CAT5 network cable and still get gigabit speeds. In most gigabit networks you have to switch to fibre optic cables which are much more expensive than CAT5.

We have our pictures, films, important documents and other files on this machine and it's great to be able to access them from any pc in the house. On top of that we have two disks in it in raid 1 which means that the data is on both disks. If one disk fails you simply replace it and all your data is still there. As a nice extra there are ways to get direct telnet access to the machine and you can actually run programs on it (it's linux). This allows you to make it into a little server of any kind. It also features a download scheduler and BitTorrent client, brilliant if you want to download big files without having to leave your PC on overnight! Highly recommended for anyone who wants reliable backups or solid network storage!

These are pretty much the cheapest gigabit network cards I could find, but they're excellent value! With these cards you can continue to use your normal CAT5 and still get gigabit speeds. You usually have to upgrade your cabling to fibre optic, but these cards force gigabit speeds through regular (and cheaper!) CAT5 cables.