We are setting up a very large Roon database on a Synology 541B. By very large I mean 14TB of FLAC. Clearly the audio files will have to live on the NAS. But can the Index live on an internal SSD And if so how much would that improve performance ?
Good luck John. Following this thread. I have a very large library currently housed on a NAS. Over 280K songs. Running Roon on my Sonic Transporter i9 and I’m getting slow response times due to a memory issue within the Roon software. Working with Roon support on this. I’d suggest slowly building your library to see how the Roon software responds as it gets much larger. I’m not with support, but I wish you good luck.
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I have 277k tracks stored on spinning disks attached via Thunderbolt to my Mac. The DB is on SSD in the same tower. I find that adding/removing/metadata changes require a reboot of Roon and the Core. Preferably do the adding/changing with the Core off, restart, assimilate the changes, and restart again. That’s what works best for me.
Thank you. Adding slowly is a very good idea.
For anything other than a small library (say 1500 albums), an SSD to hold the Roon database is essential for performance.
Personally, if I had a very large library, I wouldn’t put the Roon Core on a NAS, I would rather have that handled by an Intel NUC running ROCK, but it’s your decision.
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Another idea (although I don’t have anywhere near as many FLACs as you guys) 
I have Roon Server running on a RHEL 8 server (32GB of ECC RAM, 4-core/8-thread Intel Xeon at 3.5 GHz - a relatively old Haswell era CPU but a real server processor.)
- The Roon Server install is on an SSD (along with the OS.)
- The musc library is on a mirrored ZFS volume on two 16TB Toshiba enterprise HDDs.
The important design descisions
- Fast scanning, metadata processing, audio transformation, for multiple active users on a fast CPU
- ECC memory is essential to prevent single-bit errors
- An error-correcting filesystem (I use ZFS, but could it also be somethig like BTRFS) that guarantees there is no file corruption [that’s alot of data; statistically, without error correction, some files will get corrupted at some point without fail, even if it’s just a second-long audible blip]
- Applications (Roon in our case) on an SSD (SATA is good, but if it’s gonna be a truely huge DB then an NVME drive is even better)
- Mass data on HDD, but always in a RAID - in my case its a mirror, but could be another level of RAID, to guarantee hardware defect survival. [Mirrors in COW filesystems such as ZFS have a performance advantage, hence I prefer them over RAID 5 or 6]
- The RoonBackups also go on the ZFS + RAID filesystem - the application itself is never really of concern, should the SSD die. It’s the data that is important, and the backups to restore the metadata.
The OS can be Windows I suppose, but I am a Linux professional, and I see Roon Server as an always-on service that is to be handled like basic infrastructure, and for that I use Linux.
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I am happily using a conventional hard disc for roon core, and I have around 16500 albums on HDD’s and some qobuz additions also, around 1500 maybe?
I am not noticing any great issues with slowdowns. It can take up to 10 secs or so to display little used displays (eg if I decide to view genres or artists), but for regular used displays, like albums or tracks, it’s instantaneous. Word searches can take a little longer. Perhaps that’s horrendous these days, lol 
Lots of new products here I will need to research. We are lucky in that we won’t be streaming to mobile devices and the like. Just researching and building playlists to assist our programing people in building sets of music for broadcast that relate to each other in different ways.
I am learning many things. When we did our Roon eval we built a test set of about 5,000 songs. Everything ran off an SSD. No issues, fast as could be. The only challenge now will be just a lot more content.
Very good information here. Thank you.
I have about 12TB of local files. I have run core on a synology NAS (USB SSD for database), laptop win 10, NUC win 10 and NUC Rock.
I have used Synology for storage and also a USB 3.0 HDD array attached to the NUC’s
Best performance is NUC ROCK plus USB storage.
Easy to create, almost nothing to maintain and not expensive compared to the cost of the music content.
What spec is a Synology 541b?
I have a similarly large library stored on a NAS, and until recently ran Roon Core on a series of Mac Minis, which always had plenty of RAM and solid state internal storage on which I stored Roon’s database. Nonetheless, none of the Mac Minis (including an M1 with 16gb of RAM) did a consistent job of running Roon well. Every morning I’d wake up in suspense of whether my library would need to be restored from backup, and I made plenty of backups during the day. I’d rescan my library a couple of times a day and it usually took an hour to make it through my library. This was five years of my life since I started using Roon, which I rely on and really enjoy, when I’m not fretting about why I have to spend so much time tinkering with it. Yes, I had heard that most of my Roon problems pointed to network problems, and after fixing some network stuff, things improved.
About a week ago, I did the unthinkable: I bought an i7 NUC and installed ROCK on the internal M2 SSD. A very easy install, since I’d read and re-read the installation instructions in advance.
Now, I don’t know what I am going to do with all my free time because, changing nothing about my storage (and the punchline is that my library is stored on a Drobo NAS), everything works perfectly. All is stable. No waiting for a track to start. No waiting to identify an unidentified album. No waiting for the list of instruments to pop up when I add a performance credit. No waiting!
So: may I recommend you buy a NUC and install ROCK on it?
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Thank you for the overview. A couple of questions.
- Which NUC did you buy ?
2 RAM ? - I/0 to NAS ?
- Size of SSD ?
- More info on ROCK.
Our use is a little unusual. We won’t be going much Playout. We are trying to manage a massive library and database to take advantage of Roons ability to support a deep dive into Metadata information about thousands of LPs, artists, authors and the relationship between them in the 60s, 70 & 80s.
Thank you,
John
You are speaking my language. I spend a huge amount of time pruning and augmenting metadata, discovering connections, realizing just how many classic albums Billy Hart drummed on. Who has time for listening?
I bought the NUC10I7FNH (Tall) kit, Samsung 1TB 970 EVO Plus NVMe M.2 Internal SSD (I am sure it didn’t need to be that big), Crucial 32GB Laptop DDR4 2666 MHz SODIMM Memory Kit (two x 16GB ). I backed up my existing Roon library onto a SanDisk - Ultra Dual Drive Go 128GB USB Type-A/USB Type-C Flash Drive and transferred it to the NUC. The whole thing took less than two hours including the backup and restore. I was expecting to screw a couple of things up the first time, but it all worked!
My network: Eero Pro 6. The Drobo (and its backup Drobo), NUC, and the Mac Minis that I use as endpoints, are all wired, mostly with Cat 5 from a 20 year old in-wall installation I can’t see messing with.
As soon as I added the NUC to my network and pointed Roon to it as the new core, it just worked. Crazy.
The biggest surprise, other than the fact that I never lose connection to my library or other problems usually blamed on network issues, is that it takes almost no time to scan the entire library of over 500,000 tracks, like five minutes, where even on my M1 Mac mini it would take 45 minutes or so, during which I might be unable to play music (I lied up there; I really do listen to music as well as polishing my metadata) because of skipping. No skipping!
I really do not know what I am going to do with all this free time I just bought back.
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How big a SSD do you have for an Index for a dateset as large as yours ?
It’s actually 2x512 GB RAID 0 (hardware raid). It used to be the scratch/cache for Photoshop/After Effects/DaVinci Resolve/Fusion.
That is basically what we will be doing. More progressive rock than jazz. We will go into the deep tracks and build sets that all relate in one way or another.
My internal SSD is 1 Tb but that is way bigger than it needs to be. I think 256Gb would be sufficient for a very very large library
The questkon is about the Toon Database. Not the music collection.