I was installing pretty much blown-fibre-to-the-desktop for some of my clients twelve years ago; OK they weren't using it at Gigabit speeds [10Mbit fibre passive-hubs were the leading-edge tech back then, and security the motivation...] but like you say, fast networks make the need for local storage pretty much redundant. With Gigabit to the desktop it can work out faster to put swap space on a networked pseudodisk - an idea which really freaks some people.

I forsee a near-future desktop-PC with Gigabyte of flash-memory and a Gigabyte of RAM as workspace, with everything else coming via the network. Make the CPU conduction- or heatpipe-cooled too and you can do away with _all_ moving parts, with consequent massive improvement in reliability. Of course this presupposes a near-100%-reliable/secure LAN and server-infrastructure behind it, which is where my pension comes from....

I really think you should've mentioned how much disappointment to expect. For example, a gigabit-equipped NAS box talking to a gigabit equipped (on motherboard) Dell Opteron, the best throghput I can get (i.e. NAS box otherwise idle) is about 250Mb. It's a "home" NAS (Buffalo Terastation) so I'm not too surprised it slows down a lot under load, but unladen I think there's more to it. I'm trying to get together various other bits of kit to check but it's looking like there's an aweful lot of so-called gigabit kit out there which can't being to cut the mustard.

For one thing, a plain PCI card won't do it coz PCI bus doesn't have the bandwidth to punt through at gigabit speeds. The only good news here is as you have to use a switched network, at least a slow card only slows itself down. (Unless its in your server of course.)