What's the best way to transfer about 30 Gigs of music to another computer?
 

I have all of my music on the computer that I'm currently on right now and I need to know the best music to transfer my music to another computer over a relatives house. What would be the best way to do this?

The best thing to do would be to take your hard drive to the other house and plug it on slave.

If you can't move, that would be by FTP. what else...

Agreed there. But you could also do a transfer via a network. You just need both PCs in the same building and link them with an ethernet cable (preferable a 100Mbps or faster one). The transfer might take a little while, but it'd be damn faster than almost any other method (Cubed's method still faster of course).

Agreed that the most ideal way is physically connecting both HDs into one machine. If you have to do it over a LAN, pick some sort of server and use it. I'm a fan of SSH/scp myself, but that's mostly limited to the *NIX world. FTP would work fine.

If you have or can get a hold of a HD enclosure off a friend you can use that so you don't have to open up a relatives computer as it plugs into the USB slot at the back of the PC.

Of course if you don't/aren't computer savy enough to want to open up your PC and remove the hardive, can't use the ftp method, and don't want to take the PC over to their house, you can also burn the music files as data on to DVD discs, especially dual layerd disc's (if supported) can hold quite a bit of data.

But plugging it in and configuring it as slave would be the easiest method as cubed suggested.

Uhh... more than likely, the speed would be limited by the NICs in the respective machines.
I also recommend the crossover cable and an FTP server, though

Yeah, but who the hell has a <100Mb/s NIC these days?

Exactly, 99% of the world population does not have an internet connection above 6Mbps (without hoarding over more than $100 a month) so an ftp would be too damn slow, while 100Mbps NICs are a dime a dozen nowadays.

Kaiten, (A) you can run an FTP server on a LAN just fine, (B) You'd need a crossover cable rather than a regular CAT5 unless you have a router, and (C) he was discussing options for if they couldn't get the computers in the same building together.

Aye, grab a crossover cable, plug it into each computer, and switch the IPs around a bit to help them see each other. That's the easiest method, I say, and it's still extremely speedy. I find that really deep directory strucutres slow it down, but sheer size doesn't. I transferred about that much in movies in under 30 minutes.

98% of the time, Windows can configure such a connection automatically, so changing IPs isn't really an issue. (If you're not on Windows, you probably know how to do it anyway.)

USB external hard disk. Quick and easy, and no silly fiddling around with masters and slaves. :D