Imaging solution - ease of use, speed

Looking for opinions on the fastest imaging solution. I've used wds, sccm, ghost and clonezilla in enterprise environments both for long term and short term mass imaging projects.

I am at a place now that does a small amount of imaging (roughly 50 computers a months) and does not need a massive AD integrated multi site multi subnet solution. For this project I have a beefy g5, a 48 port l3 gig switch, and the requirement for speed. No production network access is one of my requirements. Just hook the client up to the imaging switch which is only connected to the imaging server and go.

This person is currently using an outdated ghost (licensing issues already come to mind.. audit?) server sending multicast's throughout the infrastructure a few times a day. Imaging speeds are (edit: less than)<500mb per minute.

So.. enough background. Anyone seen any benchmarks for wds vs drbl vs ghost. Which one is the easiest drop down a client? wds was my first choice but it would be nice to kill the server license and not have to introduce interns/admins to windows aik. Also i would much rather have a once a month debian maintenance day than 20 questions throughout the week regarding wds, so i'm leaning towards clonezilla ... please comment!

Thanks!