Hello Chris,
When loading a sample set from cache, Hauptwerk will still read the following files from the 'sample sets and components' folder, before it starts to load the main (sample and image) data from the cache file itself:
- The organ definition file (typically a small number of MB in size).
- The installation package definition files for the organ's data packages (to verify that they're still present and that their versions haven't changed since the cache was generated). An organ would typically only refer to a very small number (perhaps 2-4) of those files, and they would each only be a few KB in size.
Hence if you placed the 'sample sets and components' folder on a NAS, but the caches on an SSD, it would load some files cross the network, but only a few (typically less than 5), and their total size would be small (typically <10 MB), so I think the effect on loading performance would be small overall (perhaps an extra 1-5 seconds, if connected via gigabit Ethernet), and probably perfectly acceptable, especially with medium-large sample sets (for which loading the cache itself would still take the majority of the time).