The toddler loves having Kodi full of all their faves but I haven’t been able to iron out all the buffering I’m getting streaming from my mini-pc NFS mounted shares to the pi4 libreelec hooked up via Ethernet in the living room. Everything is wired, so I wouldn’t think that would be an issue but here I am about to put down a couple hundred dollars for a Synology router that looks like the monolith from 2001. Is this going to do the trick, you think? Is there another router recommended to keep a distributed little homelab (any 10tb spread between various usb hdd, raspberry pi’s and mini PCs all hosting a variety of containers and services) running smoothly? Budget I’m hoping to keep under 300 and lower the better but happy toddler and buttery smooth streaming over lan is the priority.
Flat cables can be conformant and they still have twisted pairs. Cables just have to meet the physical properties set by the standard.
Sure they might exist but the ones you buy off of That Website never are.
Just run a sustained load over the cable in both directions and/or use testing tools. Even if the cables were okay, something is sincerely wrong with that setup and its not the pi as they work very well.