Seems to me to be an unfortunate limitation. I’d much rather have the DB on my internal ssd than on my external hard drive. Seems like lots of folks want to speed up roon by putting the DB on SSD. Doesn’t make any sense to put the music on SSD (I have 8TB).
If it’s still a limit, any hope of fixing it soon?
Frustrated.
–Peter
I think there’s a misunderstanding here, or I’m not understanding the point being made. Roon Core does not “need its database to be on the same storage devices as the media”.
Roon Labs certainly do strongly recommend (for good - read snappy - performance) that the Roon database is held on an SSD, rather than a spinning hard drive. The media files can be held elsewhere; on a separate SSD or HDD, or external to the Roon Core device, e.g. on a NAS or external USB-attached storage. And if the Roon Core is running on the ROCK OS, then the media files must be held elsewhere - they cannot be on the SSD used to hold the OS and the Roon database.
If the Roon Core is running on Windows, Mac OS or Linux, then the Roon Database will be held on the OS drive (which should, as recommended, be an SSD), and media files could also be housed on the same drive if so desired.
Roon Core already does this. It does NOT keep the database with the raw music files. It keeps it on the OS/System drive.
Roon has never required that the database be on the same storage device as the media. It has always preferred to have the database on the system drive, usually an SSD. It is usually more economical to put media on a spinning drive, but with enough $ anything is possible 
Ah got it, I misunderstood. And then I thought the DB on the external drives would explain a perf problem I’m having. So it doesn’t explain it:
Doing lots with itunes
Trying to play music via roon
songs would play for a bit and then a song would play for a few seconds, stop, and roon would skip to the next track, repeat…
So roon DB on flash, not sure why it would bog down / skip when itunes / the system is busy.
Hmm perhaps the external drives were busy enough that roon couldn’t get the tracks read in a reasonable amount of time…
Nah, that isn’t it. Many people have music on a NAS or USB external HDD.
There’s something else wrong in your system. Roon should never be skipping.
Some details about your device path would help people help you further diagnose what’s going on.
I have a 4 drive RAID set (using “softraid”) on my iMac, connected via usb-c
It’s called macbt
All the music is on that RAID set
Roon knows the tracks as /volume/macbt/xxx
Normally things run fine, so I suspect that me doing some big copies around macbt was causing the skip.
Playing back a playlist, would take a bit to start, then play say a few tracks, then start playing the beginning of a track, stuttering, then skipping to the next track (never to recover from this as far as I could tell).
So does this mean, I can set up the Roon Core on my Windows 10 PC and have all the music files on a 2.5mm HDD external drive which will be plugged in to the PC via USB 3.1?
Thanks in advance
Yes. See:
Can (should) the database be held on a fast USB flash drive attached to the NUC running ROCK? How big should that flash drive be?
Short answer to both is no.
Without doing some sort of tricky maneuvering (if that’s even possible) Roon places its library on the drive that the OS is on.
Why would you want to do anything else?
OS on hard drive?
If you’ve got a NUC running ROCK, then the Roon OS (and the Roon database) will be running on the M.2 SSD, so I don’t understand your question about having the OS on a hard drive…