If you had to pick a laptop or mini-PC, which one?

The I mobile CPU is built on 10nm tech the U on 14nm. The U has better graphics and few other things that are not relevant to what you’re doing. There isn’t that much difference for what you want to do which is stream music you can do that with a celeron. For 100GB of music I wouldn’t waste money on a NAS. I keep more than that on a flash drive. You don’t need 16GB of ram I run a NUC with 8GB and do DSP conversion. All you said you wanted to do is stream music go whichever way you want but simple streaming isn’t taxing a computer.

@djones51 - That SanDisk card is sweet! An excellent solution. I assume the throughput would be adequate...

I see there's a 14" model too. This might just be the ticket!

Cheaper than a dedicated streamer and able to do more.  The only downside is having to use Voicemeeter Banana to avoid the Windows Audio Mixer when using apps like Deezer than can't use Wasapi.  

I use a flash drive connected by USB I never have had any problems. I imagine the card reader is connected to internal USB bus or PCIe.

Doing more research and I'm reading some people saying that laptop sound can't compete with a dedicated streamer/network player.  I don't understand how this could be - they're all computers, right?  

NUC is a computer, streamers are basically computers optimized for one purpose so it won't have as many processes running the CPU is usually ARM based, less noise which might be noticeable. I use a NUC and I never noticed the sound being worse than a Node2i with external DAC or an integrated amp I had with streaming built in.