Thanks. I spent some time installing Cat-6 under the house to various rooms some years back and though not fun, it has proven to be a good investment.
It is quite amazing how the lan just seems to grow.
3 NAS Boxes x 2 LAN connections each, 1 NAS Box x 4 LAN connections, a bunch of gaming consoles (teenager!), Apple TV's and assorted PC's and printers and it starts to add up pretty quickly.
Yeah, they do that ...
When we moved here about 14 years ago, I ran a Cat 5 backbone cable the length of the house under the southern eave - about 80 feet. This has three Gigabit switches along the way, and the modem/router has another 4x 100 Mbps ports.
My main workstation is at one end has a further network print server with a Laserjet 5 hanging off it, an Epson V700 scanner and an Epson R3880 printer and lots of portable HDDs lurking around. It has about 9 TB of internal drives.
The cable modem and router are at the other end.
Workstations and TVs scattered throughout, along with an Epson XP-970 printer.
NAS is good, but fast ones cost much the same as a decent workstation. I should probably jump for one with a couple of enterprise level drives in it, mirrored.