I wouldn't be too disappointed when you only have 3 outta 13 as duds. Seems your methods are good enough for the other 10 so I would suspect bad rips on the 3.
-Network setup (Ethernet to Ethernet without going to hub. Gives nice speeds up to 11000KB/s)
Avoiding a hub has microscopic speed gains. Using a hub only slows down your network the amount of time it takes electricity to run through it which could probably be measured in milliseconds. BTW network speed is usually in bits not bytes!
