I’ve got a thin bookshelf from ikea for my data area, so I’m looking for switch/panel I can just have sat on a shelf rather than mounting in a rack
My thoughts on this are, why use a patch panel at all at this point? Are you actually wiring the cable runs to a punch-down at the patch panel, or is there going to be a bunch of keystone jacks in the “data area” (which would basically make the wall a patch-panel of sorts)?
Having recently purchased a really nice looking piece of network gear with all the features I wanted at a very low price from a Chinese vendor that had absolutely no existing reputation I was aware of, my experience was enlightening with the final lesson being re-taught: you get what you pay for.
If your use case is within the boundaries of the equipment’s quality limits then you will probably do fine, but I suspect if you try to explore the more complex features of the equipment you will find out where the lack of effort and cost reduction comes from.
how secure do you think their Terramaster NAS products are
I don’t think this would be any less secure than any other consumer vendor device. I just don’t think you’d be able to get much help if anything is broken, and I wouldn’t expect to see any fixes for bugs.
You definitely should not put something like this directly on the Internet, and that advice isn’t limited to Chinese hardware. It is pretty easy to limit a device like this from “phoning home” at your Internet edge if you’re concerned with such things.
One thing I discovered recently that has actually been around for a while is MoCA which in the current standard allows you to turn your coax cable in your home in to a 2.5 Gbps LAN. Doing something like this would allow you to drop a switch at each coax outlet in your home for ethernet distribution to that room of the house, and then you can do normal office cable management rather than having to run ethernet behind the walls.
You might price out what the adapters + switches would cost and then compare that price to what it would cost for someone to run the cable for you.
Personally I would only want the most qualified electrician who also knows details like using “plenum grade” cable to run ethernet in my home. I’ve heard way too many horror stories ranging from poor cable speeds due to damaging cables during install and miss-wiring keystone jacks, all the way to fires.