How to connect a NAS, gaming PC and AI workstation

The short version

• Put the three machines on one switch. A switch sends traffic between its own ports directly, so NAS-to-workstation copies never pass through the router and never touch your internet connection.
• Give each machine the port speed its storage can use: 2.5 Gbps covers a hard-drive NAS and the gaming PC; 10 Gbps pays off between a fast NAS and an AI workstation that move large model files.
• Separate VLANs change that. Traffic between VLANs has to be routed, so it goes up to the router and back, limited by the router's port and routing speed.
• Link aggregation, jumbo frames and SQM won't speed up a single copy. One transfer stays on one link; jumbo frames need every device to agree; SQM manages only the internet link. SMB Multichannel can help in specific setups.
• The gaming PC's ping is safe as long as bulk copies don't share a congested link with it, such as a single cable between two switches.

Switching vs routing: why the switch goes next to the machines

A switch learns which device sits on which of its ports. In Cisco's words, "the device forwards the packet only to the port associated with the destination address." When the NAS sends a file to the workstation and both are plugged into the same switch, the data goes from one port to the other and nowhere else. The router never sees it, so neither the router's speed nor your internet plan is involved.

A router does a different job: it moves traffic between networks, such as your home network and the internet, or between two VLANs (separate virtual networks on the same cables). Cisco's VLAN guide states that devices "in one VLAN cannot directly communicate with devices in another VLAN without a Layer 3 routing device."

What happens across VLANs

Some people put the NAS on a separate VLAN for security. That's reasonable, but every copy between the NAS and a computer on another VLAN then travels up to the router, gets routed, and comes back down. The router's LAN port and its routing capacity become the limit.

Three ways around it: keep the machines that exchange big files on the same VLAN; use a router with a fast LAN port and published routing capacity; or route between VLANs on a Layer 3 switch. Ubiquiti, for example, documents setting a UniFi Layer 3 switch as the router for a network so it routes between VLANs itself. VLANs can also break Valve's local game transfers, which need both Steam clients to "see each other directly on the same LAN."

A router's built-in LAN ports are a switch too, but makers' spec pages, the source of our catalog, list port speeds, not how traffic between two LAN ports moves inside the box. A separate switch for the machines that exchange big files takes that question off the table.

Choosing a port speed for each machine

A link only needs to be as fast as what feeds it. Convert storage speeds to network units (MB/s × 8 ÷ 1,000 = Gbps): one 2.5 Gbps port carries at most 312.5 MB/s, one 10 Gbps port 1,250 MB/s.

If the same NAS also runs Plex or Jellyfin, streams to TVs are a small, steady load next to these copies; our Plex and Jellyfin network guide covers that side.

Three worked layouts

Switches below are from the RouterHaus catalog with the maker's price, checked October 20, 2026. Ubiquiti's US store adds a surcharge; its prices are shown with the surcharge, and the price before it follows. Wired runs: 2.5 Gbps works on Cat5e; 10 Gbps over copper needs Cat6A for full-length runs; on Cat6, industry guidance assures only about 37 m, and up to 55 m depending on crosstalk between cables (details in the 10GbE article).

1. Budget: everything at 2.5 Gbps

Router LAN port to a 2.5 Gbps switch; NAS, gaming PC and AI workstation on the switch. The Ubiquiti Switch Flex Mini 2.5G has five 2.5 Gbps ports ($54 with surcharge, $49 before it), enough for the uplink, three machines and a spare. The Zyxel XMG-108 has eight 2.5 Gbps ports plus a 10G SFP+ slot for a later upgrade ($89.99 on Zyxel's US store, fanless, 9.12 W maximum).

Copying the 145 GB 16-bit files of Qwen's 72B model takes 7 min 45 s at 2.5 Gbps by line-rate arithmetic. Good enough if you move big files weekly, not hourly.

2. Mixed: 10 Gbps where the files flow, 2.5 Gbps elsewhere

The QNAP QSW-2104-2T-R2 fits this exactly: two 10GBASE-T ports for the NAS and the AI workstation, four 2.5 Gbps ports for the gaming PC, the router uplink and two more devices. It's unmanaged and fanless, 18 W maximum, $119 on QNAP's US store. The NAS needs a 10GbE port or card (the DS1825+ lists them); the workstation needs a 10GbE port or card.

Being unmanaged, it can't assign its ports to separate VLANs. If you want VLANs, choose a managed or smart switch.

3. All 10 Gbps

For several fast machines, or a second AI box: the QNAP QSW-3205-5T has five 10GBASE-T ports (36 W maximum, fanless, $279 on QNAP's US store); the MikroTik CRS304-4XG-IN has four plus a 1 Gbps management port ($199 suggested price, 21 W maximum); the Ubiquiti Switch Flex XG has four 10GbE ports and one 1 GbE port, managed in UniFi ($329 with surcharge, $299 before it; 25 W maximum). The uplink to the router can stay at 2.5 Gbps unless your plan is faster: QNAP and MikroTik list 2.5 Gbps among the speeds of these 10G ports, while Ubiquiti's spec page for the Flex XG doesn't list the lower speeds its 10GbE ports support, so check before you rely on a 2.5 Gbps uplink to it.

A router or gateway with fast LAN ports can replace or extend the switch. These are the current routers and gateways in our catalog with four or more LAN ports at 2.5 Gbps or faster and a published price of $400 or less:

Two cautions. The routing column reads "Not published" for all seven, and routing speed is what limits traffic between VLANs. ASUS and TP-Link publish no routing figure for these models; Ubiquiti publishes only a figure with its IDS/IPS (intrusion detection and prevention) turned on: 2.3 Gbps for the two Max gateways and 5 Gbps for the two Fiber gateways. And the two UniFi Fiber gateways leave one 10 Gbps port (an SFP+) for LAN in their default setup, so two 10 Gbps machines still need a switch. For 10 Gbps LAN ports specifically, see the table in the 10GbE article.

Link aggregation won't speed up one copy

Link aggregation (LACP, standardized as IEEE 802.1AX) lets several parallel links act as one. It adds capacity for many conversations at once, not for one. Microsoft's older NIC teaming documentation explains that teaming tries "to keep all packets associated with a single flow (TCP-stream) on a single network adapter" to avoid out-of-order packets. Its current SMB Multichannel guide makes the same point for file copies: without Multichannel, "SMB creates only one TCP/IP connection per team", which limits "the maximum use of the team bandwidth".

So bonding a NAS's two 2.5 Gbps ports helps when several computers copy at once. It won't make one NAS-to-workstation copy faster than 2.5 Gbps. If one fast copy is the goal, a single faster port is the direct answer.

SMB Multichannel: the exception for file copies

SMB Multichannel, part of the SMB 3 file-sharing protocol, opens several connections for one session and can use more than one adapter at once. Microsoft's Windows Server documentation says it's enabled by default and needs multiple adapters, or adapters that support RSS (Receive Side Scaling, which spreads network work across processor cores). Microsoft also notes that with adapters of different speeds it uses only the fastest; the slower ones sit idle.

On a Synology NAS it's an option in the SMB settings. Synology's help page says both the NAS and the computer need multiple adapters or RSS-capable ones, that link aggregation isn't supported while it's on, that it's for x64-based models only, and that clients need Windows 8 or later or macOS 11.3 or later. It may also lower write speed to encrypted shared folders. That makes it the way a NAS's two 2.5 Gbps ports can carry one Windows or Mac copy at more than 2.5 Gbps, and only if the computer's side can match, for example with two 2.5 Gbps ports on the same network.

Jumbo frames: leave them off unless every device agrees

Jumbo frames are packets larger than Ethernet's standard 1,500-byte payload. Intel's adapter guide is blunt: enable them "only if all devices across the network support them and are configured to use the same frame size," because otherwise "packets will be dropped." It also says there's no benefit when standard-size frames are in use and that "additional latency may be introduced."

On a home network that also carries game consoles, TVs and phones, the safe setting is the default. If you want to try jumbo frames, do it on a link that carries only the NAS and the workstation, such as a separate direct connection, set the same size on both ends, and set any switch in between to at least that size. Intel says the switch setting must be at least 8 bytes larger than the adapter's on Windows and 22 bytes larger on other operating systems, because makers count frame size differently.

Keeping the gaming PC's latency clean

A big copy between the NAS and the workstation doesn't slow the gaming PC if the PC's traffic doesn't share a busy link with it. Switches are designed to carry traffic on every port at once: Ubiquiti lists 60 Gbps of switching capacity for Ubiquiti's eight-port Flex 2.5G (eight 2.5 Gbps ports plus a 10 Gbps uplink, counted in both directions) and 82 Gbps for the Flex XG.

Contention happens on shared links. Common cases:

• One cable between two switches carrying both a NAS copy and the gaming PC's traffic, for example NAS upstairs, gaming PC and workstation downstairs. Put the machines that exchange big files on the same switch, or make that cable faster than any single copy.
• The router uplink, when the copy crosses VLANs or the NAS is plugged into the router while the gaming PC shares the router's ports.
• Wi-Fi, if either the NAS client or the gaming PC is wireless; airtime is shared, as our article on busy networks explains.

A full link queues packets, and queued packets wait: the same mechanism behind bufferbloat, which OpenWrt describes as "the undesirable latency that arises when your router buffers too much data." SQM (smart queue management) fixes it on the internet side: OpenWrt sets it on the WAN (internet) interface, with rates at about 90% of your measured speeds. It does nothing for copies inside your home, which is why the switch layout matters. For the internet side, see our bufferbloat and SQM guide and gaming latency and jitter.