I wanted to save lots of images of my music cds, as my hard drive was full. The other computer has a dvd writer, so I set k3b to write the images to dvd. I t had to do it over the network card, and it was really slow. Took all night.
Are there faster net cards??? The newer computer has LAN on board, the old one has a cheap Ethernet card. It took 19 hours to write 3744MB to dvd.
Any recommendations??

I think that things would have went a lot faster if you had copied the files to the other machines HD, then burned them to the CDR.

Even on a slow 10Mbps network I calculate that it would take 4.5 hours to transfer 3.7GB

Yeah, I'm not going to do it like that any more. I'll plug the dvd writer into the old comp and run them straight on to the dvd from there. My transfer rate if I copy a file from oldcomp to newcomp on the lan is about 60 kbs. although the card is a 10mbs. Maybe the rest is caught in packet checking or whatever. It is really slow if you are talking of big files!

Check your wiring and the length of cable. The cable can not be more than 100 meters or 328 feet. If you kink the cable or you untwist the ends of the wires too much you will lose a lot of speed. If you are using SSH to transfer files, it is not going to be very fast. On my network I top at 3 MB/sec on a 100 MBit network with SSH. With SMB I get around 8-16 MB/sec on a 100 MBit network, but I do not know why it can sometimes hit 16 MB/sec because 100 MBit is around 12 MB/sec.

You could just get a removable HD bay. If it gets full take out (of course while the computer is off) and put a new hard drive in it. You can then use a USB to IDE device to access the drive later. The lifespan of magnetic platters is a few centries. The lifespan of DVD-R or DVD+R is around 1 to 5 years depending on abuse and if it has stick on label.