I installed and tested roon core using three operating systems on the Quieter 3C configured with 8GB RAM and the 256GB eMMC “disk drive” option
Win11: core installs and runs on eMMC like any other windows apps.
ROCK: requires an M.2 SSD; installation image doesn’t detect the eMMC
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS: OS and roon install and run on eMMC like any other linux apps.
I did a test that loaded/cataloged 20,000 albums under Ubuntu. Cataloging slowed to a crawl at around 10,000 albums. Both RAM (8GB) and swap (2GB) became full. I added an (unnecessarily large) 20GB swap file and the cataloging ran at full speed until completion. I think I would have been good adding another 4GB of swap for this collection.
ROCK would have the same problem, and since it is locked down, a user wouldn’t be able to increase swap. And to repeat, since it is locked down, we can’t know in advance if the swap file would be large enough to handle a collection this large, or if roon will detect the memory issue and increase swap on it’s own.
Regarding performance, roon on Ubuntu (with eMMC only) used about 1% cpu on this four core Celeron (without hyperthreading) N5105 machine during playback with DSP upsampling enabled. During cataloging, it did about 600 tracks a minute and 75-100% CPU utilization when audio analysis was turned on, and about 1000 tracks a minute with 20% CPU utilization after turning off audio analysis.
roon on Ubuntu using an M.2 SSD would most likely run even faster. I benchmarked the eMMC “disk drive” at about 250MB/s, which is about as fast as a good SATA III mechanical hard drive. I didn’t benchmark the SSD, but it should be about 10-20x faster unless the Quieter PC manufacturer botched something. FYI, linux sees the eMMC as an SD card according to the driver that it’s assigned to. Yes, it thinks it’s one of those little micro sim-type SD cards! Not only would roon’s writes to its database be faster to an SSD vis-a-vis the eMMC in my test, but I suspect paging to a swap file on an SSD would make a bigger improvement.
I see no reason not to use this sub-$300 fanless PC with roon for any size database using Ubuntu and an M.2 SSD. A higher RAM model than mine may run better, but I suspect the only penalty with the 8GB model would be slow initial startup times when roon loads large databases into memory and a lot of paging occurs. In-memory object databases are notorious for this problem because there’s no way to cluster huge graphs to eliminate non-local memory references. Works great if it all fits in RAM, but watch out once it starts paging. But once loaded, it should run fine, as paging from/to the swap file would be at typical/normal levels for any app. Linux (and Windows) have excellent virtual memory implementations. So much so that roon recommends running core on Windows with large (300,000+ track) databases. I’ve been running core on unraid (slackware) and ubuntu for many years.
It’s wild that this little machine costing 1/10th the price of a Nucleus+ with five year old NUC technology runs just as well as the Nucleus+. I’m just not clear how much support the extra 9x price buys – faster replies to forum posts by community moderators? I hope there’s at least some unobtainium alloy in the casework.
ADDENDUM 1: If you go the Ubuntu+roon core option, the machine does work as an endpoint too.
ADDENDUM 2: At one point, I had the machine triple booting Win11, Ubuntu, and ROCK. I wouldn’t recommend it as making the linux bootloader (grub) and Window’s bootloader and the bios configured right can cause heartburn. But it can be done. With all the fiddling around, I eventually dropped ROCK and have it dual booting. Ubuntu is the default and Win11 is still available.
ADDENDUM 3: All the talk about background processes hurting our poor fragile audio is just FUD from two decades ago when machines were terribly much slower and resource-limited than today. This machine idles at less that 0.5% CPU utilization when Win11 is running its typical 150 background processes and Ubuntu about the same with its 70 or so processes (IIRC). Anybody who worries about this simply doesn’t have the background to appreciate how light a load all this background stuff is, how light a load roon is (unless you’re doing very compute intensive DSP, like room correction with extremely long correction filters and upsampling with 8 channel surround), and how much your computer’s resources are actually idle when playing music. This FUD motivates over-priced and totally unnecessary and usually useless purchases of “audio-grade” hardware like linear power supplies and silver USB cables and $100 motherboards and CPUs in $1000 cases sold at $10,000 to consumers. I hear there’s one DAC manufacturer selling four- and five-figure dacs that sells a special ethernet card for a cool $1K.