Yeah, it felt like a bit of a dumb suggestion for someone in your position. Might work for someone with a less…robust level of need? Works for me with a QNAP QSW-2104-2T (this doesn’t meet your criteria fwiw, unmanaged, not sfp+ but there is an sfp+ version that’s still unmanaged) does that really matter if you have a pfsense box?
Edit: QSW-2104-2S is the double sfp+ version.
Er…Asus RE-BE88 technically meets that criteria but that’s a router…I think it even does the VLAN stuff?
Do you mean one of the intros to malcolm in the middle S03E06 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0
TrueNAS scale, LIS HBA cards, server motherboards with plenty of PCI Lanes ie AMD EPYC, large capacity HDD, just make sure they are CMR and not SMR drives. And Raidz2 is your friend. You will not need 40 drives, frankly you will fit 10,000 films, mostly 4K and 1000 complete TV series on a single 12 drive wide Raidz2 vDev using 20TB drives. That’s enough to last 50 years in terms of viewing time.
And here I am rocking an A71 that still works fine…why spend the money?
Thank you for explaining, as that’s really helpful for my own learning