Currently I run Roon on a ROCK (NUC). Roon is stored on the NUC’s Transcent 128GB NVMe Pcie M.2 SSD. The music itself is stored on a Western Digital 10TB Elements Desktop Drive, which is connected to the NUC via USB-3 cable.
Would there be any benefit in switching the external drive to an SSD of some sort, either internal to the NUC or external? Current issues are a delay when initiating music (presumably relating to the spin-up time of the idle HDD), and a slight delay when generating thumbnails in Roon, which I would like to be quicker.
The NUC is a NUC8i7BEH 8559U. Ram is Crucial 8GB DDR4-2400.
The device I was seeing the (slight) delay on is my desktop PC - MPG Z390M motherboard, intel Core i5 9600K CPU, Corsair 16GB DDR4-3000 RAM, Patriot SSD drive for the OS.
One benefit of an internal SATA SSD for music library is total self-containment, nothing else to keep track of. No network or cables involved.
That leads to instantaneous music access, nothing to get in the way. It would depend on the size of your Library. Thinking 8TB is the most you can currently get inside.
I recently increased my NUC8I7BEH/Rock internal capacity from 1 to 4 TB and have a long way to go before more space is needed. Also increased the RAM from 16GB to 32GB. Didn’t have any issue with RAM or need anymore but the box was open and I had the 32GB (2x16) kit ready to go. Personal preference.
Yes, I like the sound of that. But just looked up 8TB NVMe M.2 SSD on Amazon…and you’re looking a around £1200! Not sure if the small extra convenience is worth that much…
The internal storage SATA SSD would be in addition to the M.2 SSD where the OS/Database is stored. You can’t add storage to the main m.2 drive. Or if you do it’s my understanding it will be gone with the next power cycle.
Looking online I see Samsung 870 QVO SATA III 2.5" SSD 8TB for $730.00. I used the Samsung Electronics 870 EVO 4TB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD at $430.00.
LIke switching the nuc back on and not your external drive then wondering where all the music went to…as a hypothetical example not related to me in any way
Another suspected benefit of internal storage on a NUC/Nucleus could be the power up time required. I noticed on Windows that the start time increased with USB attached storage as it had to be verified during initialization. With an 8tb external USB drive attached to my PC the boot time increased by minutes. Not sure if Linux/Rock is the same but it could be.
Depends on the NUC, there are models which can and models which cannot.
As to an SSD, it will help with the initial spin up. But, those seconds are not worth the money, iimho, that a large enough internal drive would cost.
As to the thumbnails, that is due to the recent change to art. Even if local drives would make a difference, the art would have / had previously been stored in the database, so, the drive the music is on has no impact on that.
There are always pros/cons. External drives can be used as a Roon database backup location, internal drives cannot.
Managed to pick up an 8TB SSD at a “reasonable” cost, so going to put that into the NUC and use the HDD inside the NAS instead. Thanks for the thoughts!
I have an old IBM I5 ROCK connected to a Synology NAS. My music share has about 1.2 TB of music, most of it stored as ALAC or FLAC.
In addition to the Rock, my setup is 3 wireless blusounds - one in kitchen, two in bedroom, two macs with speakers, and a hifiberry in the living room. Orbi mesh for wifi.
I do get a lot of instances where music stops. That could be a lot of things but it wouldn’t be that hard to add a second drive of local storage to Rock. I could pick up a 2TB SSD easily enough and setup a utility to keep the music in synch.