Wired and Wirless network cards

[#1]

I have 2 network cards, one wireless and one wired. I also have a network drive that is wired into a router. I want to use the wireless for all network and internet activities except accessing the network drive for which I want to use the wired connection.
Can I specifiy that the wired card is used to access the the IP address of the network drive, whilst leaving everything else to go through the wireless connection.
The wired connection is 192.168.1.20, and the network drive is 192.168.1.10.
I half think that I can specify some sort of routing, but do not know how to set this up. I am using XP home.
Stephen

[#2]

By default network traffic routes via the fastest path which is normally wired.  Do you use dhcp or static ip addresses.  If static then dont specify a default gateway in the config of the wireless connection.  But this doesnt help with lan traffic...  You could also play around with the routing table on your pc (enter route at the cmd prompt for extra help).  Ideally you would need two separate subnets but again as your network drive is attached to your router, you cant do that unless your router has that functionality...
in simple terms, it is not simple to achieve what you want.....
I'm not a windows expert so someone else may be able to totally rubbish what i have said and show an easy way to do it 
regards

[#3]

I dont see what you are trying to do. If you have a network cable which is twice as fast as wireless even on a bad day why do you want to use the wireless at all?
On the network card you have 100 meg so even if you used 8 meg on the internet  it would leave you with 92 meg for everything else so why use at best 54 meg connection when you can have 100 meg?

[#4]

Thanks for your suggestions, and I've got to admit I don't quite know why I want to make things complicated and use two cards. I now see that I should probably just use the wired card, and disable the wireless.
The network drive is connected to a wireless print server, not the main wireless adsl router, so since there is no need to always have the print server on. I suppose I was just wanting to make sure that there was always an internet connection via the wireless route.
However, with the wired connection I can write data to the network drive at 3-4Mbytes/s, but I can only read at 200-300Kbytes/s. With the wireless connection I get 1Mbyte/s both reading and writing!?!
So, it looks like that it is best to use the wireless connection for general use, and if I need to transfer large amounts, I will use the USB connection on the network drive.
Stephen

[#5]

Quote from: Soapy

However, with the wired connection I can write data to the network drive at 3-4Mbytes/s, but I can only read at 200-300Kbytes/s. With the wireless connection I get 1Mbyte/s both reading and writing!?! So, it looks like that it is best to use the wireless connection for general use, and if I need to transfer large amounts, I will use the USB connection on the network drive.

You can't read a drive faster, simply by using wireless!
Are the speeds you give for sequential or random access?
If the former, then the speed is terribly slow and is not good for a mixture of sequential/random access unless your file system is really badly fragmented.

[#6]

Quote from: axisofevil

Quote from: Soapy However, with the wired connection I can write data to the network drive at 3-4Mbytes/s, but I can only read at 200-300Kbytes/s. With the wireless connection I get 1Mbyte/s both reading and writing!?! So, it looks like that it is best to use the wireless connection for general use, and if I need to transfer large amounts, I will use the USB connection on the network drive. You can't read a drive faster, simply by using wireless! Are the speeds you give for sequential or random access? If the former, then the speed is terribly slow and is not good for a mixture of sequential/random access unless your file system is really badly fragmented.

I know what you are saying, but that is the fact.
My wireless router is a Xyzel Prestige 660HW-T1 (192.168.1.1) and my print server is a Netgear WGPS606 (192.168.1.8, default gateway 192.168.1.1)
If I turn off the wireless on the print server, and use it only as a hub, and connect the wired card to it (with the wireless card disabled), I can only read from the network drive at 150-200kByte/s
If I then disable the wired card, re-enable the wireless card, and then turn the wireless back on on the print server, I get a read speed of initially 150-200kByte/s but after restarting the print server I can read from the network drive at 1.1Mbyte/s!?!
I have tried connecting the network drive directly to the wired card using a cross-over cable, but I still get low speeds.
I know that the wired card should be faster, but the fact is the wireless link is faster for reading from the network drive.
Stephen.
ps, I am using a 350MB file for the testing.

[#7]

If you are interested in sequential disk access speeds, back in 2002! have a look at http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/13-idehdd-roundup.html
Note that they used a mighty machine with 256MB main memory as a test bed.
As you will see, 20 MB/s write & 40 MB/s read were no trouble.
So unless you have a Sinclair spectrum, you have serious problems. Obviously you have a certain amount of protocol overhead - Is your local MTU / window size set correctly?

[#8]

I tried my laptop connected with a network cable, and I got 3.9MB/s both read and write. So I went and rechecked all the settings on the wired NIC on my desk top, and changed the setting on the card from 'forced 100 FD' to 'Full autonegotiation', and lo and behold I am now getting 3.9MB/s both reading and writing on that PC as well.
I am sure that the card setting was originally Full Autonegotiation at first, but I changed it to forced full duplex trying to solve the slow speed!
Anyway, looks like everything is OK now. From what I have read elsewhere, 3.9-4MB/s is the maximum speed that the LanDisk enclosure I have is able to do.
Thanks for your help.
Stephen.