Answers
One question, one straight answer
57 questions, each on its own page, each answered in a few hundred words rather than buried at the bottom of a listicle. Where the honest answer is "the number on the box belongs to a standard and describes no link", it says so.
Choosing
How each family differs, what a first buy should cover, and which of the two halves of this site a problem belongs to.
Compatibility & fit
Slot lengths, keying, rack depth, cable category and PoE class — the published standards that decide whether a part fits what you already own.
Throughput & standards
What a class figure like AX3000 or 2.5GbE actually counts, and why no single link reaches the number on the box.
Capacity & units
Why a 4 TB drive shows up as 3.64 TiB, which convention a maker publishes, and what the difference is not.
Backup & redundancy
What a RAID level survives, what it does not, and why a second copy somewhere else is a separate decision.
Endurance & warranty
TBW, MTBF and warranty years are three different published figures, and none of them is a lifespan.
Wireless coverage
Bands, channel width, node placement and what a maker means by the square metres printed on a mesh box.
Cabling & connectors
Categories, shielding codes, solid against stranded conductors, and the run lengths a standard actually allows.
Power & protection
Volt-amperes against watts, what a UPS runtime figure assumes, and what a joule rating on a surge strip describes.
Noise & heat
Drives and fans that live in a room with people in it, and the figures makers publish about how loud they are.
Setup & firmware
Bringing a device up, what a maker publishes about update support, and how long that support is stated to last.
When it goes wrong
A link that keeps dropping, a transfer that collapses halfway, a drive the machine stops seeing.