NUC (Rock) vs NAS

Yes, you will. I’ve been using 2 x 2TB LaCie USB3 rugged drives with a NUC6i5 without problems.

Thank you so much to all, for the replies.Im gonna get everything ordered this afternoon.

This is a non-issue for me, personally, but then I’m also old school and follow a fairly ritualistic practice in importing new music (gets placed in temp directory, use mp3tag to clean up/adjust metadata in the files themselves, listen to them via VLC to ensure the files are not somehow corrupt, etc. – only then do I copy them to my music library, and I manually manage the directory structure there as well) and I actually prefer going to the library storage and manually clicking on “rescan now”. New content imports are also a one-and-done as previously stated, and not super frequent for me (and while I think this is probably true for most users, I get that there will be Roon users that are big collectors and import on a daily basis).

(I assume ROCK must increase the sysctl tuneable for watch contexts, as the default in Linux is only 8k objects so anyone with large libraries would easily exceed the available watches otherwise, resulting in watches failing even on local storage.)

To me, the main reason someone would consider local library storage is to have everything self-contained. There is a certain simplicity there, since you don’t need your computer/etc running. But if they already have a NAS, there is a good chance that is left running 24x7 and so availability isn’t an issue.