This might sound stupid, but I really have no clue how this works because 90% of server related videos I watched either talked about prebuilt NAS options or skip the actual connection part.

So I’m currently getting into homeservers and I have put together a few build for a gameserver. Later down the line I want to include a NAS into that which I already planned for by having enough sata ports and space in the casing.

But looking for drives I noticed a lot of them come at 6gb/s read/write. But the mATX boards I looked at all come with 2.5gbs at best. I know network cards exist. Another issue would be that the boards don’t support pcie 8x, they either have 1-2 pcie 16x and 1-3 pcie 1x. Most network cards I have found were really expensive or 8x.

2.5gb/s is already plenty in most normal use cases.but I don’t feel comfortable deciding on a mainboard before understanding how to go about this bottleneck. Is adding 2-3 2.5gb/s network cards and option? Switches are a thing. So could you add 3-4 Ethernet cables from NAS to switch to router?

I’m really sorry if this is sounding like a joke, I hope someone give me the missing links of information to understand this