I mean have your LightRoom library on PC and have it realtime sync to your NAS so you still enjoy the speed. If that’s not what you want you want it on NAS you should consider 1 GBe is your bottleneck. You want opt for something faster.

Good info I’m keep that in mind when I setup pfSense so far I only need it up and running so I can proceed with next setup. As soon as performance bottlenecks I’ll come back and study this. Half of it was still new to me.

You can store your work files on your PC and have them synced over the network. That way you still have your local NVME speed and you can have peace of mind knowing those files are in good hands (after a set time of course). Once you don’t need to edit those files you can archive them by moving them to non-synced folder so they won’t eat up the space.

With 1GbE in local network it still transfers way faster than over the Internet.

On a 4 disk RAID 5 setup you’re getting about 3X speed of a mechanical drive which will be about 300-400MB/s which is almost on par with 2.5 inch SSDs. However there’re 4 drives spinning at the same time and will consume about 100w of power so keep that in mind.

Surprisingly I have it up and running after rebooting the AT&T BGW320 gateway. Turned out all my setting was done correctly. All I have changed was to clear existing DHCP clients and disable onboard WiFi. Didn’t think those matters and didn’t understand why a gateway reboot is needed but it works now.

Thank you all for the input I can finally live a happier life now.