On my Synology NAS 920+ (with 2×12 TB HDD and 2×1 TB SSD), Roon runs directly on the NAS, with the Roon database located on the SSD. As space started to run low, I decided to offload my DSD files to an external USB drive.
I connected an 18 TB WD Elements Desktop drive via USB to the 920+, moved the files over, and immediately gained a lot of free space on the NAS HDDs. Everything seemed fine at first.
However, it turned out that the WD Elements drive goes into sleep mode automatically and cannot be woken up without physically unplugging and reconnecting the USB cable. Not ideal.
With the help of ChatGPT, I set up a small keep-alive script on the NAS that writes a file to the USB drive every 5 minutes to prevent it from sleeping. That worked well.
But then came the nightly forced disconnection by my internet provider (don’t ask why this would affect the USB drive — I sure can’t explain it). The NAS is located in the basement and connected to the home network via powerline (DLAN), which might be part of the issue. After each disconnection, the WD would go back to standby.
So I added a scheduled task to reboot the NAS shortly after the expected nightly disconnect. This brings the WD back online automatically, and the keep-alive script keeps it awake from there.
It’s been running smoothly for a few days now, and Roon is correctly indexing the files stored on the external drive.
Hopefully this helps someone facing similar issues!