^ Netgear 8-port Gigabit switches are £20 on Amazon. Switch from USB drives and Sneakernet to Ethernet and an SFTP client app (Windows to HTPC) that queues files and transfers them in the background while you're doing something more interesting.
Fair enough BUT since I don't want to lay cable throughout the house and WiFi doesn't cut it I'd need to replace my current 100MB powerline ethernet adapters with gigabit devices, then buy a new PC since my current one only has a 100MB ethernet port.
I already get things going on my Windows PC over SAMBA and just let it get on with it. Generally speaking even with the slow speeds on the RPI3 that wasn't to bad since its only changes (mainly new videos) that were being transferred.
Also if the implementation of ExFAT delivered the same time modified details as the old RPi3 I'd wouldn't have had to move the HDD. I could probably have coped with a few software mods if the variation was consistent but it wasn't, well it was always an hour out but the files affected varied.