Dell Power Edge Server

I am caught between buying a more powerful NAS and an optimized NUC to run ROON. What would prevent me from buying a Dell Power Edge Server ($965) and using that for ROON? It has a Xenon processor/8G RAM and a SSD drive?

You can place a NUC in your living space – especially if you use an alternative, fan-less, passive cooling case – and then use it as endpoint to connect to (part of) your audio gear. If you don’t need/want that, you can easily go with the Dell if you like. You just have to set him up yourself with an OS and Roon. As ROCK is designed for NUC’s you can try it if you want, but don’t expect it to run (properly) on the Dell.

Nothing at all.

Why do you need a more powerful NAS?

I don’t believe Xeon CPUs are appropriate for what Roon does. I had a dual Xeon motherboard and it was no better than my i3 NUC. Just because it’s a Xeon doesn’t necessarily make it more powerful. Of course, that would depend on the clock speed.

See longer discussion here, that I asked in a post a while back -

For 1/2 the money you can get an i5 NUC that will be quieter, much smaller and much more mission appropriate.

I’m guessing you’re are going to buy this Dell used on EBay? That’s were I bought mine. If that’s true, then $965 is an outrageous price. I think I paid less than $300 for my server.

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You’ve posted this question in the “ROCK” sub-category (although it looks like someone moved it to the generic “Roon Software” category now). Be aware you won’t be running ROCK on a Dell server; it almost assuredly does not have drivers for the PERC (LSI MegaSAS) RAID card typically found in Dell Power Edge servers. If you’re comfortable installing your own Linux distribution and then manually installing the Linux Roon Core on that, you’ll be fine.

FWIW, I run my Roon Core on a Dell R230 w/ E3-1270v6 CPU running CentOS 7. The R230 is dedicated to Roon; I don’t run anything else on it. It works just fine, and can even do upsampling to DSD512 without having to enable the paralize Sigma-Delta option. (Though I don’t actually do any upsampling in Roon under normal usage.)

I went with the Dell because rack mount is my desired form factor. (I have a 42U rack in my computer room at home.)

As others have said, “nothing at all”. But just because you can doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

I’d be wary of idle power usage if you care about your electricity bill, and of (physical) noise if you don’t have a silenced rack / computer room.

I will expand my answer by asking questions. Everyone’s use case of Roon is different and to really answer your unasked question, NAS, NUC, or Dell Server, we would need to know more.

What is your vision of using Roon and your current setup? What is the current and projected size of your library? Do you envision doing a lot DSP and/or upsampling in your playback? How many endpoints will the server support?

All these questions affect what the best hardware is for your use case.

Thank you everyone! I don’t have much of a digital setup just my music FLAC files on a Synology NAS (older model). I need everything. So I was thinking of consolidating the NAS with the ROON appliance on a server that’s all. And yes, utility drain is important and looking at the I7 Nucleus consumption, I will have to get a second job. I saw that servers are really dropping in price and I could always bury one in the cellar.

I use a Dell Precision with Windows 10 as a file server. Pretty solid, less drama.