Why don't get a HP NC360T PCIe x4 dual GBit network card, mod it to PCIe x1 and install it in the PCIe x4 slot meant for Remote Access Card?


Actually any type of desktop PC can be made into a NAS. Put more hardisk in, do some simple sharing and you're done for a small office setup.

Don't forget to set up for backup. Cheap and fast would be backup to USB 3 or eSATA type of external hardisk.

You can either buy synology / qnap put in hdd and good to go or build your own with that budget.

I own a qnap 469, N54L (Win server 2008 R2), N36L (Xpenology) and latest Gen8 Microserver (Win Server 2012) in my office and house.

My future project is build a intel H87 with Xpenology and retire my N36L

If I were you, I would change my router to a nice ASUS one. Then you should be literally able to get 10 times the speed you are getting now(actually more lol)

basically you need a gigabit router as the unifi one is only fastethernet, so the limit is 12.5mBps only...

EDIT: oh, you have a switch, so then I guess your PC NIC or your ethernet cable is knocking down the connection to 100mbps from 1gbps. Try to check whether your PC NIC is gigabit or not, and also see whether the cable is faulty or  not. I had a crappy cat5e cable before that was stuck at 100mbps. after changing it, straight 1gbps

Just change your switch, cheaper and less headache, for cheap layer-1 switch it's plug&play.
If you seriously needs 16-ports Gbps switch then it's much expensive, more than RM200+ (DLink brand), not so sure about TP-Link though.
8-port Gbps switch is around RM100 or less.
And about your "8mbps", is it MegaBytes? or Megabits? Huge difference there.

Cat5, erm... well Cat5e can sustain 1Gbps speed without any issue in my home's network, but I'm not so sure about huge office environment (more than 20 PCs).
For home network where there's less than 5 busy devices on a single network, it's fine to use just Cat5e with cheap layer-1 switch, no issue at all.
I'm using DLink 8-port Gbps switch, no issue on my end yet, been running months non-stop, the only bottleneck could be my hard disk, running without any RAID.
To maximize the huge files transfer speed in Windows network, you can actually set the Jumbo frame to 4K and above, but best to set a standard amount (4K or 8K, etc.) for all PC's network card for stability issue, it has been tested on my end here, from 60MB/s to 75MB/s, could be more depends on the hard disk speed again, can reach 90MB/s and above easily with really fast hard disk or SSD on both end.
For few PCs access a single device, that'll again depends on the hard disk accessibility speed, also it may depends on the services as well, priority queues stuff like that.
I have 2 PCs access a single file shares before, watching full HD movie on both sides without any issue, no lags at all, but if you going to seek the movie, probably will need to pause for few seconds (lag) instead of instantaneous seek.