The HC2 has a sata port onboard, it's literally designed for NAS-type applications. I can't speak of USB performance since there's nothing connected to it's single USB port. The C2 is my torrent machine, and serves the torrent directory on a SMB share from an external USB hard drive. It can usually handle 40MBps+ without issue, depending on what else the drive is being asked to do. Of course, CPU load will go to 6/ when doing that, but that's just because USB transfer is an intensive process on these little boards. It has 4 USB ports, but I only have the one connected since that's all it needs. It also handles Squeezebox duties, so it's not doing a whole lot but the disk access during downloads can get intense. The HC4 that I suggested to AOU has onboard SATA and is styled like a drive dock.