My preference is to use local hard drive storage for all my music files, versus a NAS (network attached drive). So my music files reside locally with Foobar2000 on my server PCs, and I'm not dependent on the state of some other network device.

Again this is just my preference, and not necessarily a recommendation since I know there are advantages to using a centralized NAS for your music library.

If I don't have large enough internal drives and did not want to update them (i.e. if I had to also reload the OS), I also use large external USB drives to store my music.

When I update internal drives to larger drives I recycle the old ones as external USB drives using USB SATA hard drive enclosures such as the Sabrent Ultra Slim one. About $8 on Amazon.

If I had a super large music library many terabytes in size, I would re-look at using a central NAS, shared by all my different music servers and tuned to make sure there were no network performance issues.

I do have on my home network two older smaller 1TB dual drive NASs in a mirrored raid configuration, but I don't use them for my music library, though they could serve that purpose.

Again I prefer having my music files local either on an internal drive or attached USB drive.

One reason is I sometimes notice Foobar2000 can hesitate a moment when I press play on a track if there is any system delay in accessing that media file. This is more so if I'm accessing Internet radio, where Foobar2000 has to fetch media off some Internet address.

But it can also happen with an attached external hard drive if the PC has shut it down to save power if it hasn't been accessed in awhile. You can mitigate this by configuring your Power Savings modes in Windows to not turn off hard disks or suspend attached USB devices if you are plugged in.

Also with NAS drives, ideally for performance, you want wired connections, especially if you are dealing with large uncompressed audio files. But for ease of access reasons, I run some of my Foobar2000 servers attached wirelessly to my network. So I did not want to deal with any wireless network variables in slowing access to my music files from my Foobar2000 servers.

The other advantage is that having separate local disk music libraries effectively gives my several backups. But that entails a little more work when I add new files to my music library. But at this point, I'm not adding huge numbers of tracks to my library...