Agreed Black Jack, an 18-20TB External should be fine. But my intent was to also use the NAS for household file storage and file syncing with our 3PC’s.
I wasn’t aware that “Roon works best with local storage”. I wonder how often problems occur? By the same token, I presume our Internet works best with Ethernet, of which we have many home runs. But our Ubiquiti router and WiFi access points have provided unwavering, rock sold access.
I’m familiar with the WD link and the QNAP one. But the QNAP TR-004 is priced between the two Asustor NAS’s that I referenced, so why buy TR-004 vs a NAS? Would it be to provide better Roon accessibility as you suggested?
For me, a NAS is for convenient storage, not to store backups. Back-ups should be stored offsite, because of site-wide viruses, fire, and storm damage, so RAID is handy if a HD fails (which a 4TB HD in our present QNAP, just did). But mirroring is unnecessary for our purposes. For ALL of my important audio, video, photo and data files, I have back-ups on site and stored elsewhere.
No uPnP, audio, video and photo needs at this time.
Do you really care? If you’re affected you are unhappy for sure (and possibly blame Roon Labs for it).
real-time monitoring is not guaranteed
Roon may keep your NAS busy all the time (don’t expect your NAS drives entering standby)
you may loose (temporary) access because of changes introduced through updates (on either side, NAS or NUC) until resolved
Roon will purge the library if the storage becomes unavailable (update that requires NAS reboot for example), content gets added back when the NAS is available again but Roon service may be interrupted until finished
other NAS activity may have an impact on Roon (slow response, loss of service) especially with a cheap low performance NAS
…
You can use the forum search to find other users various issues with networked watched folders and also from ROCK: Storage Basics:
These are examples I provided, not knowing how much storage space you need for your music library. I’m sure you can find something that suites your needs.
Which is why I don’t get the point about a 2-bay NAS. There is no redundancy other than (the overpriced) mirroring possible. What I showed with my example (TR-004) is that you can have “reasonable” redundancy (if wanted) using external storage too (at a price, but still cheaper than a 4-bay NAS).
I my opinion, if you can’t run the Roon Server on your NAS then forget about utilizing a NAS for Roon.
Thanks for Roon/Rock storage link. I hadn’t seen it.
I love multi-functionality, which was my intent with the Rock-NUC/NAS premise. I’m now re-thinking that. Simpler does seem to be better. Leave the NAS for what it’s primarily for and pair a Rock-NUC with an USB External HD and rock-on (sorry for the pun, I couldn’t resist ).
Suppose I leave a Rock-NUC running 24/7 with 1-USB External HD attached. If Roon isn’t being accessed by a remote (e.g. phone/laptop etc.), do you know if Roon will sleep and only access the HD and as such the HD will also sleep, until a remote wakes Roon and Roon wakes the HD?
Other users may be able to tell you that, my setup is NAS based.
In general, make sure external storage complies to the USB standard in terms of power consumption or has the option to be powered externally. Use a powered USB-hub if a hub is required in your planned setup.
Keep in mind that some combinations of USB host controllers, drivers and client chips didn’t go well along in the past too (no standby, immediate wake-up after entering standby, time to standby to short, wake-up time too long). Check products online for known issues before you buy.
Maybe invest in a UPS or at least over-voltage and surge protection for the NUC and its peripheral components.
Good question. Roon is definitely not going to standby and doing something to permanently scan the external storage for changes. If you are lucky, this process would not affect the external drive to cause head tracking noises (such as during Read/Write procedures), but I would not expect it to ever sleep or spin down/up.
I am not sure which size of an external USB HDD you are imagining but I do not think the available models are made for being accessed 24/7. If they do have neither an internal cooling system nor temperature monitoring (and a 16TB HDD or alike produces a lot of heat) I personally would not want to have my precious music files on such a device without any backup or redundancy.
My experience with attaching a 5TB external HDD to my NAS and let roon access it as a storage is not really convincing. Pocket drive is spinning 24/7, being quite noisy compared to internal HDD of my NAS, and all procedures moving a lot of data (especially backup, file relocation and scanning/analyzing) take a lot of time, bringing the whole system to some kind of halt. Expect significant delays when starting a stream.
I personally tend to recommend either an SSD-only solution attached to the NUC, or move everything to a powerful NAS which can handle both the files and roon for a big library plus taking care of internal, designated NAS HDD including RAID, backup-on-the-fly, energy schedule, deep-sleep-standby for the HDD and alike. My experience is such that RAID1 is for huge HDD really helpful to speed things up in roon and keep the system available while you are doing a backup, audio analyzing or alike.
//SARCASM-On
If you’re inclined to believe in anecdotal audiophile myths and want to extract the ultimate essence from your „resolved“ system, you owe it to yourself to get something along the lines of a WADAX Atlantis, and isn’t then any superfluous non-audio-related computing task pure heresy, like monitoring tasks and threads to put the thing to sleep on inactivity!? SARCASM-OFF//
Now, really, just get any capable computer device, NAS, MAC, PC(Windows or Linux) with as high as possible base, as opposed to turbo speed, with as many physical cores as you’re planning to have zones running concurrently (double that up if you’re ever planning to do any DSD processing with parallelized delta-sigma modulators), directly attach a USB disk with your music files and set it up away from your audio systems.
That link in the “audio“ chain is only processing data and really has no impact on ultimate sound quality.
If you want audiophile „noise“ isolation for your primary system get a Roon Ready network streamer that ticks your preference boxes to feed your DAC.
For additional „non-critical-listening“ zones, get cheapish RaspberryPi‘s or other supported single board computers or prefabricated streamers that output accordingly to the respective digital or analog device, and you’re done.
And to my knowledge, none of the possible Roon server variants may ever go to sleep, since neither Roon nor most connected end points can gracefully recover as of yet.
).