A Roon on (Synology) NAS Primer

[Wade_Oram]

@Jerry_Zigmont

My first Roon Server was hosted on a similar Synology DS1019+ with 8MByte of RAM and 5 6TB seagate IronWolf Pro HDDs in an SHR2 array (2 disk redundancy) with, at the time, a single 512GByte NVME SSD providing a write-through SSD cache. However, unlike you, I stored my Roon DB on the RAID array.

I then moved to a NUC11TNHi7 with 16GByte of RAM and a 256GByte Samsung EVO M.2 SSD for the OS running RoonOS (as installed by ROCK). I have to say that the UI performance of the NUC was a marked improvement compared to the 1019+.

However, there are a couple of reasons why your experience may be different to mine.

1. At the time my library was quite small (I still hadn’t gone to the effort of ripping all of my CD’s) - much smaller than the 33000 tracks that you have.

2. With your database on a USB attached SSD, you may see a difference in DB access performance. I’m not sure how marked this would be. The USB SSD would definitely have better access times (although not as good as an internal SSD (SATA or NVME) but the USB SSD would not provide better data rates - the SSD performance would be limited to the 600Mbps of the internal SATA III interface.

With regard to DSP performance, there is no doubt that my NUC is far more capable than the DS1019+. Just yesterday, in order to help someone else out, I was playing a 19skHz/24bit stream with convolution filtering and conversion to DSD256 and still only using about 33% of the processing capability of one core. I am pretty sure that this setup would have been impossible on the DS1019+. For details of that signal processing chain, see my post at:

Issue with Convolution of DSD Files in Muse Leading to Stuttering During Playback (ref#M5YE05)

It is likely that the processor in your Roon Server is not powerful enough to do the convolution on DSD files. If you look at the signal path in the Roon desktop or remote, you should see a value for processing speed. If this value is ever less than 1.0, then you are working (at least one core) of your processor flat out and it still can’t keep up with the processing that is being asked of it. In practise, the value moves around a bit and instantaneous peak values can be slightly lower than the…

With regard to the Nucleus One, this would almost certainly be higher performance than the DS1019+. Howver, the comparison between the NUC and a Nucleous One is more difficult. I would imagine that it would depend upon which NUC you chose. I suspect that the highest performance NUCs (possibly including my 11 gen i7) would perform better than the Nucleous One - but the lower performanace ones not so much. However, at this point in time, it is hard to say because the hardware specs for the Nucleous One have not been published.

I should note that the Nucleous One is said to support up to 10,000 albums or 100,000 tracks - which, if I remember correctly, is the same sort of spec as for the old Nucleus Plus.