The data transfer is only a small part of the equation.
The speed of your data bus on each computer and the actual speed of the hard drives involved is critical too.
IDE controllers are not know for blinding speed.

The speed you mentioned, is typical for a Ghost backup to an IDE drive.
You can't go any faster than the HD's can write the data.  Sorry!

Merry Christmas!
The Shadow 

Ok I have done some more tweaking and I have managed to get some additional speed out of my gigabit network by disabling QoS and the deterministic network enhancer.

However, using "standard" compression (higher compression seems to slow things down too much probably because the cpu is slowing things down), the performance starts at around 250-350Mbps which is good but then slows to a crawl towards the end of the backup (9Mbps). I also had to turn of the verify image option as that was painfully slow over the network (who knows what it is actually doing??).

So from the above you can see that my network and disks are more than capable of transferring the data (even a direct file copy through explorer is fast at 300Mbps) so why is Ghost so damn slow?!?! This seems like a bug or something.

Perhaps Ghost has difficulty writing to large backup files of 200-300GB in size? Would upgrading to Ghost 14 help or some other backup tool?

Or perhaps Ghost struggles when confronted with large uncompressible files on the filesystem and tries to compress them? I might try turning off compression all together, not ideal but I'm running out of ideas.

Cheers,
Richard.