10GBe For the cost I was thinking it may be worth it? My router has both 2.5G WAN & LAN ports, so if I were to go the NAS route and pickup a a Synology capable of 10GBe I could marry everything up to a small 10GBe switch and get increased performance; at least that is how I understood things.
Traffic still has to go through your router and will therefore be limited to 2.5GbE. But I think the bigger point, that many others have tried to make, is that it's overkill.
* 10GbE is useful if you regularly do larger sequential reads/writes (multi-gigabyte files). You're not going to notice much of any difference with small random reads/writes like photos, tax documents, or your itunes library.
* You've noted that most of your network devices run on wifi that wouldn't come close to utilizing the increase in bandwidth even if you were saturating it with huge multi-GB files.
As someone who has set up numerous home servers over the past two decades (using Windows, Mac, and Linux) and now runs a Synology, go with the Synology or comparable brand. I hate to think of all the time I wasted building hardware and then configuring
and managing software when a dedicated NAS gets me 99% of the way there with much lower cost and 1/100th the amount of effort.
I love technology and playing around with stuff, but I was gobsmacked when it literally only took me a few minutes to add hard drives, click a few buttons, and then have a fully redundant central storage that supported numerous file share protocols (including Timemachine), and that communicates with my UPS and powers down gracefully in the event of prolonged power outages to prevent data corruption.
