New to Roon and loving it. I’ve read a few post on Roon/NAS overall and the 453 Pro by Qnap, but not the 453Be.
It will have 8GB RAM so think that is fine. Plenty of disc space. What I am concerned about is the Celeron J3455 processor. Seems like the general guidelines is i3 or i5. I’m currently running Roon on a old i7 laptop (circa 2012) with a SSD and no issues beyond long-ish connect times and an occasional pause in the music. Annoying, but not life threatening. It has a spot for a M.2 drive (I think) but my current NAS is just spinning disks so not really sure how that all fits together.
Should I pull the trigger on the TS-453Be and give it a go or plan on keeping my Core and music on different devices. i3/i5 TVS-X72 units are really not in my budget.
Hi @RPlace,
Welcome to the Roon Community!
How large is your library? Do you plan on using any digital upsampling or signal processing? Usually it is an accumulation of these factors that bring underpowered CPUs to their knees.
If your library isn’t too large, a larger USB drive might be a better bet for storage. If you buy a NAS, put in the drives and add an M.2 SSD you’re near a grand and will always have some level of compromise w/r/t Roon.
Even a baby i3 NUC, M.2 drive, RAM, and a 2 TB USB drive is half of that and you’ll have better performance, even under fairly demanding circumstances.
Hello Rich, and welcome. I considered going the Qnap NAS route when I first looked at Roon about a year ago. Thought it would be good to get storage and a platform to run Roon on at the same time, but as I added up the cost of a unit with what I thought was enough power, plus storage drives, the price got higher than I intended to go. Started out running on my desktop while I sorted things out.
Decided to go with the dedicated server and built a NUC8I7BEH with a internal SATA drive for the music files. It cost around 800 with the NUC, Ram, m.2 drive and Sata drive. It always works as it should and I have not been disappointed.
It is a lot to think about, good luck whichever way you go and enjoy.
I would not buy a NAS for the purposes of running a Roon Core. The others have good suggestions. But, honestly, if you are fine with the current setup then stay with it.
If not, maybe there is something to be done in getting the laptop to run better. You have it connected via Ethernet and not wireless?
Thanks @grossmsj I’ve already got a 3TB mirrored NAS that is long in the tooth and running out of space so it is being replaced independent of Roon. Just though it would be nice to have one less device running if possible. I have gone back and forth on a i5 NUC. If I go that route I’d want to do it once, right and be done so I’d probably skip the i3. The NAS fills the needs for other things including video, pictures, system backups, etc. I don’t really want to get in the habit of synching a USB drive with my library and plug it into the NUC after updating. I’ve got music in lots of spots in the house (SONOS, OPPO, Dedicated DAC, etc.) and the old laptop with SSD seems to be keeping up for now.
FLAC files are about 1TB right now. Ever expanding. Guess I’ll just tackle one problem at a time. I might have PLEX in my future so maybe on device just for storage and a better/bigger 2nd box for Roon and PLEX. Given my situation the two would never be used at the same time.
Oh, well that’s a different story. I’d still go for the NUC, but if you are getting another NAS it won’t hurt to give it a spin and see how it works for you.
I have a NAS too, and it does lots of things. So nothing really against NAS. But the NAS is only backup now. Putting an SSD in a NUC is just so nice. Snappy user response. Files appear immediately.
Good luck! It would be good to hear your experience.
I’m starting to come to that conclusion. I’ve had a NAS for years and they do one thing well…storage. Seems like by the time you get them powerful to do other things AND do them correctly they are more costly than a high powered server and a rack full of drives.
Am I correct in my beliefs that it is the Roon DB and currently buffered music that needs to be on a SSD and not the entire library?
All of my meaningful endpoints on all three floors are wired ethernet, not WiFi. I do have some background music units that are WiFi; but if it matters for dedicated listening all components Core, NAS, Player, etc are all wired. Reasonably fast switches and related hardware.
I was hoping 10TB of RAID 10 storage with a 1TB SSD on the NAS along with the 8GB of ram would do the job, but starting to think I’ll scrap the 1TB drive there and put that toward a future i7 NUC. The difference between 4 and 8GB of RAM is trivial so might as well, right?
Thanks for the warm welcome, I’m sure I’ll be bugging you all more with the typical been there done that questions.
How about a music question instead? Any Blue Note fans out there especially the Hard Bop era? Lee Morgan anyone?
I run Roon Core on a fanless computer I built using an old Celeron G1840 processor. It’s a dual core compared to the quad core you are considering but runs at 2.8 GHZ compared to 1.5 of the 3455. It gives me enough processor power to playback using Roon convolution DSP for anything up to 352 kHz FLAC and DSD 128. On 352 flac and DSD 128 the Roon processing speed indicator is just over 2x so it cuts it kinda close but still twice the needed capacity. Playing anything else the speed indicator shows anywhere from 20x to 70x. Not sure how that translates to the capacity of the Intel 3455.
Promising feedback, thanks! Still getting used to all the bells and whistles. Can you point me to this “speed indicator” you mentioned? Do I need to look at the core itself or is on the normal Roon UI on the controller?
The Processing Speed indicator is part of the Signal Path which is viewable by clicking the little light dot to the right of the track title in the footer.
Take a review of a post I did… years ago…about what processing speed means
So far so good. NAS arrived yesterday and work prevented much beyond setting it up and getting the drives formatted. This morning read a link: https://kb.roonlabs.com/Roon_Server_on_NAS
It suggest in a 4-bay NAS to have 2 drives RAID 1 a singe SSD for RoonDB and the 4th bay for backup. I happened to have a spare 250GB SSD drive hanging around so I installed that and set it up as s Static Volume via Qnap.
The installation of Roon on Qnap was very easy. Once I started Roon Core it asked for the DB location and I pointed it to the new SSD. Running Roon on my PC I had to point it at my new Core, enter ID/PW and just like before Roon saw all my devices. Seems like I am off to the races.
I’m still in the process of migrating music files but the ones that are present are playing on my office device. So far so good.
One question about backups. I have the old Core backed up. I set up two accounts on the original core. One for me one for my wife. I also set it to dark interface. I’m guessing the backup also contains my bookmarks, play history, likes/dislikes. Is that correct? Can I restore my old backups from the original Core running on Window laptop to a Qnap’s version of Room and have my new one with my old ones history? Or is the back up only for restore on the same system?
I scrapped core on the NAS and bought a 8i7BEH NUC. Roon on qnap was okay but as time went on it was slower to respond to input and dropped connection.
It was obvious that the old i7 laptop was a better option than a new NAS. NUC bests them both.
NAS was also a nightmare for viewing DVD rips. Nvidia shield and Plex helped out there.
If that’s true, why should any NAS manufacturer put Intel cpu in its devices? For storage, most cheap arm based cpus would do the job.
You are comparing a Celeron driven NAS with i7 equipped systems. It is no surprise, the laptop and the NUC beat the NAS.
So the generalisation “NAS = Storage, period” seems quite far fetched.
I admit, that NAS with adequate specs are quite pricey compared to a NUC and I would not recommend it to anybody who only wants to use it as a Roon Server.
Sorry if I offended the NAS loving world out there. That was not my intention at all. I was just trying to relate my experience in the hopes of helping others. I’ve gotten lots of help here, trying to give back just a bit.
Bigoted, really? Wow.I hardly think that is warranted.
This was an experiment. If you read the entire thread you will see that I was buying a new NAS to replace my current, aging one. I was not buying it to run Roon, I only hoped it would. In order to have one less devices in the house running/consuming electricity. I have solar panels, care about energy consumption and that sort of thing in general.
Head over to the QNAP forms and you will see plenty of posts where people describe their difficulty using NAX “x” to run Video Station, Plex, Roon, Kodi, etc. Many of the suggestions are to us the QNAP for storage and something else to manage your content. I’m starting to find out first hand that is the case…at least for me. If not you, wonderful. I’m happy for you.
Everyone’s situation is different but for me I can’t see any payoff in buying a high priced NAS, i5 or i7 for example. just to have one box. I think a good analogy from the old days of Audio past would be that a separate preamp, tuner, amp(s) win out over an all in one “receiver”. The QNAP does storage very well.
I am in no way bigoted towards NASs. I like mine just fine. As an application server I don’t care for it. Perhaps I should have said:
“My NAS” = Storage, period…no exclamation point…for me and my situation and that YMMV.
Sorry, no offense was intended from my side.
Regarding bigoted: I actually had the German word mind and ran it through a translator, as I could not come up with an english word for it. Maybe it did not reflect my intended meaning well.
I have no issues with any feedback, but the conclusion that all NAS are only good for storage seemed wrong to me (especially due to the added “period” in your equation).
My apologies too. I did not see you were from Germany, the ugly American in me just assumed you were from the U.S. I’d like to think I am open minded and tolerant. Bigot is a pretty harsh word here, especially given the guy currently in charge.
Are you a cycling fan by chance? I am huge fan of Tony Martin. And lets not forget Jens Voigt one of my all time favorites.
