I’m running a NUC i7 with internal storage but find it doesn’t offer any flexibility, for example, new music can’t be placed on the drive. (Or am I mistaken?). I want to find a budget solution for transferring CD’s to a drive that can be accessed by the NUC. I know a NAS would do the trick but doesn’t seem simple and external hard drives connected to the NUC could work but tend to fail. Then there is the ripping vehicle, which in this home, isn’t yet established. So looking for hardware device for ripping discs and storing on my network or directly into the NUC. Thanks for any suggestions.
You don’t really need a NAS, they are useful but expensive and not necessary. Just attach some usb3 storage to the NuC and make sure you back it up somewhere else say to another drive or cloud based backup. For ripping the simplest solution is to buy a usb cd drive and attach it to your computer and rip them using some ripping software. For Windows then DB Poweramp is the preferred choice here but there is also EAC. I’m sure there are similar for mac. A more automated solution could be the InnuOS Zen Mini which is CD ripper and store as well as being able to act as a Roon endpoint. If your more computer savvy you can build you own Linux pc station and install and operating system called Vortexbox which will autorip discs for you, this is what I use but it runs on my NAS as a VM with a usb cd drive attached to the Nas.
Whatever you choose you can either just attach the drive to the pc to put files on it or connect to the storage on the NuC if your using Rock or windows.
Why do you think that new music can’t be placed on internal storage? I assume you mean the additional 2.5" drive that can be used for music storage; not the M.2 SSD used for the ROCK OS and the Roon software?
Yes, the internal storage not the SSD. I already have some music on the other drive but I did that once before is was placed into the NUC. I don’t want to have to pull the drive out so wondering how one would access that drive to transfer files to it?
Well, the first time a 2.5" physical disc is installed in a ROCK NUC, the ROCK OS needs to format it in order to use it for music storage. So it WILL be formatted. So it’s pointless to have music on it before installing it into a NUC - it will be blown away by the formatting.
However, once formatted, then the drive becomes accessible over the network for storing music on it directly.
For example, if you’ve got a PC running Windows, then it should be visible in the Windows File Explorer, e.g. for my NUC running ROCK:
