At work I have 3 desktop machines. How do I transfer files between them fast?
Should I buy a small switch or hub and connect the three desktops together? If I buy a switch would it be best to by a NAS device and connect it to the switch or directly transfer files to each machine, from each machine.
What type of speeds are achievable with commodity devices?
The suggestions in the comments would be the best - using a gigabit LAN network for the fastest data rates and simply use inbuilt OS files sharing over the network.
However if you would like centralised/shared network storage, the following router with a USB 3 SSD of sufficient size would be an excellent investment for the purpose:
http://www.cnet.com/uk/products/d-link-dir-857-hd-media-router-3000/
Note that a true NAS will perform better and have a greater number of features, however the above (when correctly set up) should perform to a high level already, which may be preferable to buying a router and an expensive NAS solution.
Hope this clears things up.
it really depends on your needs. E.g. how much money you are willing to spend, what do you call common. Do you want to be able to edit the same set up files simultaneously. Do you want a single place to backup files from? In the latter case a fileserver or a NAS is a good choice.
On the other hand if you are working on local files and occasionally transfering them to another PC then local files are much faster and a solution sunch as this one makes sense.
If money is not an object I would even go for NAS/Fileserver with SSDs, and 10GbE all around, including a 10GbE switch.
But as posted you might get a lot of opinion based answers since 'fast' etc is quite relative.
