Exponential
Occasional Visitor
Thanks bud.Sounds fine. You'll see what works and what doesn't once everything is hooked up. 2.5 between the switch / router makes sense to feed the laptop the best possible speeds out to the internet. It also gives you room for other traffic since your ISP speed isn't 2.5 or maybe it is / don't recall.
ONT <2.5> AX6000
AX600 <2.5> switch
Switch <10> NAS
Switch <2.5> NAS
Switch <5> Laptop
LAG's can be useful for redundancy and higher speeds but, you're wasting time / ports considering the changes you're making already to make the best use of the switch ports. Considering the port speed of the ax6000 you're making the best decision until you decide you need a faster router down the road with a 10GE port W/L.
5GE will make quick work of the transfers though to the NAS w/o the higher expense of a 10GE dongle for the laptop. Now, the only thing that I don't think we discussed is the drives and how you set them up in the NAS. Whether you went JBOD / Riad 0 / Riad 1 / Riad 10 or Raid 5. 5 won't get you a huge amount of speed but, offers more space than R1. R0 gives you tons of space and speed but, not redundancy. Raid 10 gives you a blend of both.
Looking at the specs the next potential bottleneck would be the NAS itself but, looking at https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/ts-464 shows the potential for 1.6GB/s using M2 NVME drives. For 4 x HDD though in R10 you should be about 1/4 of that somewhere in the 450MB/s range or slightly higher since they're 7200 drives. Now, that still leaves you room for adding M2's if you really need more speed but, the limiting factor is the laptop drive speed. If it's a SSD it should be plenty fast but, would cap out at ~550MB/s and even an early NVME would still be able to push 1.5GB/s though more recent drives like Gen4 can hit 5GB/s and Gen5 10GB/s.
It's a bit of a slippery slope though if you keep yearning for faster data. Like the photo of a substation you could easily end up there in the pursuit of speed. It's possible to do anything you want if your bank account supports it. There are even NAS devices that are all NVME based and then the issue becomes the network speed and you have to get creative with 40gbps cards and DAC cables. In the case of a laptop I don't think that's possible w/o using something like an external GPU enclosure to put the NIC into it for the DAC to plug in. It gets kind of silly unless you're using a desktop PC that has more expansion options. At this point you'd want to go DIY to max out the speeds you can achieve with a custom build. Rolling up the functions inside a single box breaks away from the restrictions of a "router" / NAS and opens the data bandwidth to the extent of your imagination.
You've given some really useful information to chew on there!
So we are agreed on the networking side and I'll have that all up and running when the new devices arrive in a few weeks so I'll get everything prepped for then....
Some info on the NAS:
I have 4 x 6Tb Toshiba N300 7200 HDD's running in a RAID 5.
I've installed 2 x M.2 nvme's (1Tb each) - one is used for the applications storage and the other is Read-Only Cache.
I've also installed a 2 x M.2 nvme SSD internal pcie for Read/Write Cache (2Tb total)
All nvme's installed are Samsung 970 M.2's.
I made a daft mistake when ordering the SSD internal pcie card as I could've bought the one with the 10Gbe port pre-installed but when purchasing it (less than 3 months ago) I though I would never need such speeds and didn't buy it! How wrong I was!!
I am going to take a hit on the pcie card I currently have in favour of the one with the 10Gbe port installed and sell the old one (minus it's nmve's of course) on Ebay.
I installed a noctua fan in the NAS too and it is SIGNIFICANTLY quieter than the stock fan.
I'm going to do that same for the switch, get 2 x 40x40x20mm Noctua fans for a quieter and more efficient fan.
The noise from the switch is audible so it's worth it.
The router upgrade will be far off in the future but when the time comes, I'll be much more aware of my options (mostly due to your input).