Digging through the man smb.conf help pages, I came accross this option: large readwrite. The man page clearly stated that this was the default setting. However, a 64bit capable kernel/OS is needed! So I set large readwrite = no in the smb.conf file, restarted the deamon, and bingo!
I now am able to juice the Beige box from my XP and OS X clients. Performance is great:
- Write to SMB share: About 4MB/s
- Read from SMB share: About 2.5MB/s
I have only tested it under a heavy load for a few days -- but it is doing great so far. BTW, I have my L2 cache enabled via Sonnet's utility, and I am _not_ using old NDRVs with on-board video (XpostFacto options).

