However, my Empeg is still relatively empty. Maybe as it fills up it will slow down a little?

Shouldn't do. But it is possible that your empeg with a nice big modern disk has much better disk bandwidth than mine with a slightly clunky Toshiba 14G unit of a type which I don't think we ever shipped to users.

(Even a crap disk's bandwidth is much more than 850K/sec, of course, but the point is that the CPU is quite busy when it's talking to the disk, and the less time it spends busy, the more time it has to service network traffic.)

Peter