Fast Access File Storage

There is a non raid and a raid version.

Would the NAS provide quicker (or equally fast) access than a USB 3.0 connected RAID array? The RAID box doesn’t require drivers.

From a playback point of view either are suitable, speed between the devices really isn’t a factor in file playback. I currently use USB 3.0 attached drives but previously used a NAS and observed no difference.

icybox IB-RD3620SU3, does appear to do its RAID 0 and 1 in its own system independent of the attached machine.

The fist one I linked to was the u3 version which is just a JBOD, the su3 is the raid version, well made reliable little box.

I know, I read the manual for the correct version, which is what I responded to.

I still don’t understand your objective.
Why do you believe these problems are caused by disk speed of the media library, rather than the database or cpu?

I have the fastest cpu available for the NUC (the i7), and the database is what it is (large), so this is the only angle I can think of to improve things.

Are you running the database on an SSD? If not that will be the biggest improvement.

@philr Right, that’s my point.
That (small) SSD has a huge impact.

@Ronald_Lyster Is it just that your library is doing background analysis? Can you post an image of your settings>library

This is the best discussion I have seen on how different hardware impacts Roon’s performance.

Yes. I have a 128 GIG m-Sata SSD drive on which everything but the music files is placed.

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Thank you all for the sage advice. My inquiry is quite specific, and may not be of general interest. I have an Intel NUC with its fastest processor and more RAM and SSD storage for software than ROCK can handle. I may have the wrong Roon settings, and if anyone can make suggestions on those it would be greatly appreciated. Otherwise, my question is whether speeding up access to music files will have a noticible effect on Roon performance (updating the library and retrieving files to be played). I assume my larger than average music library has something to do with the access speed, and I’m hoping to improve performance by using a RAID array. (I cannot afford a 12 TB SSD drive.) I posted in the ROCK directory because that is what my music server is - a ROCK machine. If my ROCK machine is already maxed out, and faster disk access will have no noticible effect, so be it (and I won’t waste money buying more hard disks).

Hi,
I think you need support to look at your ROCK. There is something not right about the behaviour you describe and you should not be getting those errors with ROCK and external HD storage. What make of external disks do you use? Do they by any chance go into a sleep/hibernate mode and ROCK has to wake them up on access?
Putting the error messages to one side, the client you use can also have a huge impact on how you perceive Roon performance. I usually drive Roon through an old PC that I have updated to WIN 10. Its graphics card is a good few years old, so Roon client performance is not exactly snappy, but perfectly useable. My wife uses her ipad Air 2 to drive Roon. Even though the ipad is a good few years old, it goes like the proverbial greased lightening when running Roon Remote, as does my Macbook Pro.

Overall, music plays fine. There are occasions when there will be a pause in queuing up the next song, and that is what I would like to eliminate (if possible). I’m not sure what triggered the recent library settings changes, but Roon has been making these changes for the past three days. That’s just an example (not the only example) of what is taking more time than I would like.

Adding

I think that Roon tries to pre load the next song in a queue, so there is definitely an issue here. Ditto the library changes issue, which should not be going on for that length of time. Have you tried rebooting ROCK?

Let me try that (rebooting). Thanks.

Rebooted and was given the opportunity to do a software update. I did so, and when the update completed there was no more “applying library settings.”

Is the consensus here that a RAID 10 array would not help (it’s a bad idea)?

That’s my view. Something is bogging you down, but it’s not the disk.

Just look at the numbers.
Disk transfer rates are measured in Gbit/s.
Latency is measured in milliseconds.

This is many orders of magnitude faster than you need, and what you experience.

RAID10 (1+0) is primarily for disk io intensive applications which Roon isn’t, also as it stripes data across mirrored pairs you require a minimum of 4 disks but only benefit from half the capacity, so no I don’t think it would be necessary or the best solution.
Recently having core and remotes on different versions has caused some issues so ensuring ROCK, Roon core and Roon remotes are all up to date and let us know if things improve.