But, if you take into consideration that a flash drive on a SATA 3.0 port, (which is 6 Giga-bits per second), can do 550MBps, (MegaBytes per second), that's about 5 x 1Gbps Ethernet ports. (And yes, today you can get a Samsung 1TB mSATA drive with that performance.)
Most people don't realize that with in-expensive / home equipment today, you can easily exceed 1Gbps Ethernet. When I took my DVD & Blu-ray collection, (all my own discs), and extracted them to a media server, it took a long time to copy them around. Worse, my old media server was a fit-PC1, which had only 10/100Mbps Ethernet. Between my desk top and faster server, I could saturate a Gigabit Ethernet connection. But still took a long time to copy 1 to 10GB files around.
Even if we only get 2 or 3Gbps due to CPU & memory speed limitations, that's still MUCH higher than single Gigabit Ethernet. It's better that we use a single Ethernet because LACP / Trunking with multiple ports does not always work the way we want. Specifically, between 2 points, you won't get the combined speed. Only between multi-points...
Of course to support that speed, an eSATA port, (preferably one with SATA expander support), would be helpful.
So, this is what I suggest for a FACET card:
- 2 x PCIe lanes to a 10Gbps Ethernet controller chip, with copper port
- 1 x PCIe lane to a SATA controller chip that supports a SATA multiplier
- Pass the USB 2.0 through for the eSATAp, (eSATA with power)
But, if the speed numbers hold up, (2-3 times more performance than a single Gigabit port), it would be worth it for me.
P.S. I work in major data centers, and we too have growing pains getting 10Gbps Ethernet on our, (expensive), servers.