Android TV kodi and networking

Afternoon,

This prolly isn’t the best place to ask this but I’m really struggling and hoping someone can help:

I’ve got a laptop with 4 external usb drives connected to it. Kodi all works fine and is great.
I switched to an Android box so I can play 4k movies.
I networked the android box to the laptop so it had access to the drives. This way I can download stuff onto the drives using the laptop and then just add it to the kodi library on the Android box.

However, the wireless network (Smb) doesn’t seem fast enough and anything above 720 just buffers.
It’s Wireless N and so it should be fast enough but for whatever reason it’s not.

It seems to me that if I could hardwire them together instead of using wireless it would prolly work.

Any advice, what’s the best way to achieve this? Can I use a cross over cable? Would it work? Or how about if I plugged another router in etc
I’m not the best at this kind of thing and I just want it to work. It’s not a complicated setup.

Any help would be greatfully received because I’m at the end of my tether with it.

Thanks in advance