File copying painfully slow on NUC Roon Core

Roon Software Discussion
1

Not sure if this is the right part of the forum to post this but…

I run my Roon Core on a NUC7 i5. I have my music on an external SSD connected to the Core via USB. I’ve just purchased a new, larger SSD and am copying all the music files from the existing SSD to the new one. Both are connected directed to the Core via USB but the estimated copy time for 415GB is 6 hours! This should be significantly faster even over USB 2 surely?

2

If you have both disks connected to the NUC and you copy over the SMB network share, then the data route is not USB disk > USB disk but USB disk > your computer > USB disk. Hence, the limiting factor is the network. If your computer is on wifi, then this is more limiting than if it’s connected by Ethernet.

If there is no other Ethernet traffic, you can expect ~100 MB/s on a regular wired Gigabit LAN, so 360 GB per hour. On wifi it depends on the bandwidth of the connection, but is always more problematic because wifi can’t send and receive at the same time and there’s necessarily reduced throughput.

1 Like
3

Thanks @Suedkiez I did indeed start the copy from another computer via the network. Still surprised as my wifi network runs around 500mb/s and the wired connection is 900mb/s. I should have just disconnected both SSD’s and done the copying via the main Mac.

4

This is not necessarily the practical throughput rate, which on wifi is much more variable than on Ethernet. First of all, as mentioned it can’t send and receive at the same time and copying over the network needs to do both. The packet drop rate is also higher on wifi and there are more resends and generally more infrastructural traffic. And finally it’s variable with environmental influences like other wifi networks in the vicinity, and this is not straightforward to pinpoint.

5

Lesson learnt. Next time I want to copy my entire library over to a new SSD, I’ll not do it via the NUC. I’ll connect both the old and new drive to my Mac and copy them over from there.

6

Gave up waiting. Shut the server down and unplugged the SSD’s. Connected them to my Mac and did the copying there. Took about 15 minutes.