Any difference in SQ from USB drive storage to NAS playback?

Mapman.
Thanks for being open minded!

That also sounds very plausible too.
Could very well explain why to my ears played from the nas has more body and dynamic than from an attached USB HDD or even USB flash drive.

I am always receptive to trying it out but sometimes also interested in just why something would act as it appears to.

Are the media files the same  Flac or Wav on both the NAS and USB drive? Is the drive a small 2.5 device that is being powered by USB or does it have it's own power supply? I actually have a similar problem using my Node2i. Streaming from Tidal sounds a little better to me than streaming from my hard drive attached to my router by USB. I can't imagine the N100 has a poor USB implementation I imagine it has noise reduction galvanic isolation.

Djones if the streamer is accessing files on a remote device directly via a network file share, the file share protocol may be a bottleneck that could limit bandwidth. Better to run music server software on the device hosting the files and allow streamers
to connect to to music server as clients.

Media files are identical flac files ripped with same software at same time.
All I did was download them all to USB HDD drive and some to USB flash drive for a comparison.

Can't really tell any difference between the two USB drives but from the nas it sounds slightly preferable to my ears.

I should point out as others have that jitter and noise vary by format. For any USB ( 2.0 and 3.0 ) I use the Audioquest Jitterbug.

nice story : I was visiting an unnamed robotic machine tool supplier to check progress with final acceptance testing of a $100 M fleet of machines. Open the panel and it is chock a block full of Jitterbugs. I saw the MTBF and bit error rates with and without. Ordered enough to plug all the ports that evening.

your ones and zeroes mileage may vary