Thanks for your reply! So much useful information there. This definitely sounds like a good long term development for me. I’d better start saving up! 
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In the Synology world, I can absolutely underline your choice. I have tried a lot of NAS machines running roon core, and AMD Ryzen R1600 is one of the best CPUs among the affordable models. I would not call it overpowered, on the other hand. Its computing power for a single thread in boost is comparable to what roon is selling as a Nucleus+ and it is very useful for a snappy, reactive experience if you happen to have a bigger library (50k+ tracks).
The original roon FAQ article on roon on nas being quite reserved when it comes to CPU like AMD, Celeron or Atom is dating back to 2018. It is understandable as most of machines back then were pretty underpowered. Affordable NAS with CPUs being able to compete with i3 and i7 in roon´s own Nucleus appeared only lately.
When testing several systems despite from AMD R1600 based Synology I found machines with latest fast Intel Celerons such as N5105 and N5095 to be surprisingly capable of providing a smooth roon experience.
From how I see the market currently the most attractive affordable NAS for roon is Asustor´s AS5402T. It is a ´2 bay + 4 slot´ model so if you are willing to invest into some higher-capacity M.2 bars it makes a pretty powerful package with lots of RAID and backup options.
My personal choice is the QNAP HS-264 being the first fanless, completely silent NAS with such a powerful CPU. It is a bit pricey and less versatile in terms of slots and connections but in my understanding the perfect machine for the living room.
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@Arindal thank you for this corroboration, and you are 100% right. I have a library that is now just short of 47,000 tracks (all local) and Roon is quick and smooth as butter.
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I tried roon on a Synology DS723+ (SSD-only) equipped with the same CPU running a similarly sized library and can absolutely confirm your report: smooth as butter.
A few more tracks (65k), slightly more complicated library structure, very big HDDs and the aforementioned Celeron N5105 are feeling not as snappy compared to the AMD but still a pleasure to use. In theory these are better with multitasking running several broad streams (DSD256 cross coding, convolution filters, heavy DSP, 5 zones and more) at a time.
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Just throwing another option out. I’m partial to Synology - my current Synology NAS is, I think, my 4th over more than a decade. At this point, I choose Synology for brand loyalty and familiarity with its apps and OS - other brands may be as good or better.
I have a rack mounted RS1221+, which is based around a Ryzen V1500B.
I like this device because, while it’s rack mounted, it’s “network depth” not full rack depth. This means that if you intended to use it without only network depth gear, such as UniFi stuff, you can go with a network depth rack. In my case, I wall mounted a 6U network depth rack which accommodates this NAS, a UniFi UDM Pro, a UniFi switch, a power strip, and a patch panel.
This route only makes sense if you want to go the rack direction and you intend to take advantage of its capabilities - it’s overkill if you just want storage and Roon.
I appreciate that you folks continue to keep this thread active.
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in case you need an fan less nas have an eye on qnap ts-410e.
it works fine in a docker container with a library of 80k tracks.
Indeed the Qnap TS-410e is a very capable yet even more pricy alternative if one wants to rely on 4 slots 2.5" SSD being completely silent. CPU power is similar to the HS-264 which has 3.5" HDD-capable bays but just 2 of them. In the current series of Qnap SilentNAS solely the HS-453DX is inferior in terms of CPU power. For a small library certainly sufficient but I found it to be noticeably less snappy than the aforementioned.
BTW there is no need for a docker container or manual install if you run QTS 5.1. Roon is available in the app center for instant installation and you can conveniently direct it to the SSD of your choice as a database location.
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i know the roon package. but in the past they had some troubles with this. especially when upgrading the qnap os. so i decided to use the container.
This appears to have been updated 16 days ago. Not certain what, if anything has changed since there are still references from 2018 in it.
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I also add my thanks for this thread. I have a Drobo 5N (documents / audio / pictures / etc.) that I just recently realized has been unsupported for more than a year.
I now have a DS1522+. I was already leaning toward going with the DS1522+, and this thread helped push me that direction. I also have a Nucleus+ from 2020, so I don’t have any real need to put Roon on the DS1522+… but I can. 
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Nice to hear your feedback, @gsuzor91. One thing I wish I had added was that, when I upgraded the RAM in my 1522+, I bought the official Synology ECC RAM module. There are some other threads where people have upgraded their RAM and are having issues, and I don’t know if they used the recommended RAM, which might becontributing to their issues. Anyway, I am still trucking along smoothly, now with ~2.2TB of music, and ~49,000 tracks, all local.
Another Drobo refugee?
@DDPS I bought the recommended RAM, so now I’m at 16 GB total. I also added two official M.2 drives. For now I have them in a SHR storage pool and put the RoonServer shared folder (checksum data integrity on) in a btrfs encrypted volume. (I’m playing / experimenting with the entire system, so just seeing how everything works.)
Since my last post (not that long ago ) I installed Roon on NAS. Just to try it out, I deauthorized my Nucleus+ and pointed my Roon “Remote” (Windows 10) to the Roon Server on the DS1522+. I did not attempt to do any kind of Roon database restore.
I previously copied my Nucleus+ internal storage to the music shared folder (SHR2 on 4 hard disks) after installing Audio Station. If nothing else, I’m going to see if Audio Station is useful for me to create playlists.
So, with a fresh Roon Server on the DS1522+ and a fresh copy of my library locally in the music folder, I wanted to see if the HAF convolution filter I have would cause any issues. I’ve been listening for two hours and no issues so far! This is even with playing a 352.8 / 24 album, though processing speed for it was between 6.4x and 7.2x. Near the limit but still working. (I’ll have to go back and check what the Nucleus+ does for this album.)
When the processing speed was 6.4x for the 352.8 / 24 album with the HAF convolution filter, I was also running a Windows 11 vm on the DS1522+. I was connected to it via rdp and it was running robocopy to copy data from my Drobo-5N to the DS1522+ while I was playing the 352.8 / 24 album in Roon. Not too bad.
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I was late to the party, but yes. I finally had a bad disk which kicked off this entire adventure. The Drobo 5N itself is still operating just fine, though I realized if it acted up, I would be in a bit of trouble.
I still have a Drobo FS, which is probably 12-14 years old now, but still working fine, although by now every disk in it has been replaced at least twice…It probably would still work just fine, but I got tired of re-enabling SMB1 after every windows update or policy push on work computers. And 1522+_is so much faster, too.
Still wish Drobo would have released something newer, I like BeyondRAID better than SHR for the flexibility (although if things go South SHR is probably easier to salvage) but oh well, Synology is good, and it does run Roon…
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Hi there. Just a quick question. I’m still planning to upgrade but wanted to check, if you export a playlist to Roon from Audio Station, can Roon play it with volume normalization?
Yes /10char
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Howdy, I’ve been using a DS1019+ with 8 Gbs of ram for several years now. My hard drives are rotational and not SSD. I have put the database on an attached USB SSD.
I have 33,000 tracks.
Is there anything I can do to improve performance or responsiveness? It works flawlessly, but it can be a bit laggy.
Would a NUC a better way to go? And or the new nucleus one coming out in May?
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.
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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.
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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:
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.
Thank you @Wade_Oram for the thoughtful post and your attention to detail. If you were going to buy a NUC today, how would you spec it out? And what would be a ballpark price for the hardware?
Really not sure how much I want to invest into this, or simply roll along with my existing system.
Thanks again.