Another question I have: is here any real reason to go with a “well known” brand for an unmanaged switch? I’m seeing multigig offerings from places like mokerlink and trendnet for significantly cheaper than recognizable names like D-Link or TP-Link.

For the POA switch I’m hooking directly into the second NIC of my NVR, I’m going with a used unmanaged poe+ switch from a well known manufacturer, since poor power handling could be a potentially fire safety issue, but I’m wondering if anything can really go wrong with an unmanaged switch.

Thanks for the replies everyone. I think I’ll just run two cables. Compared to using a managed switch and VLANs, running a second cable isn’t that much extra hassle over running just one, and a gigabit internet bottleneck isn’t actually a problem since I don’t intend to purchase a multigig bandwidth plan.

It’s good to know that with my proposed set-up there won’t be any device-device bottleneck, as I actually do intend to use 2.5gb internally from time to time.

Can you just load them as normal drives? Then use mergerfs to pool them together?