The hard drive in my old Roon server died recently, so I figured I’d take the opportunity to get a NUC and put together a ROCK host. It’s working great so far, except for one thing.
I share the server with another household member, and we each have our collections set up as different storage locations, so that she can use a bookmark to filter to just her music. I don’t see a way to set up multiple storage locations on the ROCK internal storage, so am I missing something with that? If not, is there any other way to create a focus by physical path to separate out the internal storage?
I’d really like to keep our music collections synced to the ROCK host, to avoid issues if the NAS is bogged down with other traffic. We were occasionally seeing long delays and track skips with Roon on the old server, and I suspect it was due to resource usage (the CPU on the host was split amongst a lot of processes, and it was loading music directly from the NAS), so I’d like to eliminate that as a possible source of issues, but it’s also important that we be able to easily view our collections separately.
I have requested that the internal drive can have subdirectories. Until that happens I have my storage on a n external usb drive. I am not sure the rational behind this difference.
Hmmm. I guess I should have specified that I’m hoping to do this without going back and tagging each of our thousands of albums, and then having to do the same every time we add an album. I’m really hoping for it to be automatic, like it has been with separate storage locations.
I did think of one other possible way to go, though. If I set up an rsync job on my NAS to copy over each of our libraries on a regular basis into the ROCK’s internal storage and have it watch the NAS locations as well as the internal storage, would it treat the internal storage as effectively a cache, switching to it if the NAS is being slow?
Realistically, I strongly suspect it was probably heavy CPU use on my old Roon server that was causing my problems rather than the NAS, but I’m hoping to eliminate as many potential issues as possible.
You could just use an external usb hard drive instead. This also gives you the ability to do backups, since you shouldn’t do database backups to the internal drive.
I’ve got the backups going directly to the NAS (which, incidentally, is what saved me from losing my database when the hard drive in the old server died). So, that’s already sorted.
I guess a USB drive could work, though. Would I be able to access it via SMB? Part of what made the internal storage an attractive option was the ability to set up an SMB mount on another host and use rsync to back up our music collections.