I have a linux file server with uncompressed HD video files that are hundreds of GB in size. It think the largest is about 250GB. What is the fastest way to get a file loaded onto a Windows machine for editing? Some general possibilities are

1) Copy file to external HD. Carry disk to Windows machine and attach it there.

2) Use a standard file server protocol, e.g. NFS, CIFS, iSCSI

3) Use a specialzed transfer program, e.g. rsync or firehose

The machines are on a gigabit lan with little traffic. I could add parallel lans or 1394b links if I wanted.

For #1, the question comes up of which file system to use. Format the disk as NTFS an use something like ntfs-3g, or format the disk as ext2 an use the ext2 installable file system for windows.

For #2, it appears iSCSI is generally at least as good as NFS, and sometimes better.

For #3, there is a program called firehose that transfers in parallel over all available connections. I would imagine that this is the fastest network transfer program because it dispenses with all niceties and just shovels bits as fast as possible.

Anyone out there with experience to share on this particular problem?

Just to answer part of my own question, I transferred a 2.7GB file with firehose, NFS and rsync between two Debian servers running sarge (3.1). Transfer rates were

88 MB/s firehose
21 MB/s rsync
14 MB/s NFS

The absolute numbers are less interesting than the relative numbers. Just for reference, md5sum goes through the file at 68 MB/s and cating it to /dev/null runs at 104 MB/s. Firehose is close to hitting file system performance limits, which would mean that copying the file to an external disk and walking it over isn't necessarily faster then transferring it with firehose.