Goodbye NAS, hello USB drive

Roon Software Discussion
1

Up to now I had been using a NAS filled with all my music to feed Roon, every time I added new files to my NAS ( my neverending hobby till I finally have all my stuff ripped) I had to do a complete new scan.
Now I thought of changing something, so I plugged a usb drive into my NUC and filled that with my music, now this is my source for Roon.

It is so much better! I copy something to my folder and immediately it turns up in Roon - so I am really happy with my upgrade. I had read that the Roonies themselves are not so keen on NAS for music.

So for anyone wondering where to put their musicfiles - don’t go NAS - internal HD or usb disk are so much more comfortable than NAS. So now I have more room for all my other junk on the NAS. So win - win :wink:

17 Likes
2

Yep I did the same thing it makes for a very different experience. I just clone the drive every now and then for backup.

4 Likes
3

Totally. Huuuuuge difference!

1 Like
4

Same here!

5

Yes. Use the NAS as a backup device and/or where you put your backups, but keep the music on a usb drive or an internal ssd. That’s the best approach.

5 Likes
6

what are the improvements by using this approach?

1 Like
7

It just works. Often too many flakey issues with a NAS being a primary for music. With a local USB or SSD, you get optimal speed of access to the music from roon core. The NAS does work great as place to backup music and as I previously noted, it works great as the primary for roon backups (much better than dropbox IMHO). With my synology NAS, I use CloudSync to backup my music backup on the NAS to offsite cloud storage (BackBlaze). Of course this is my opinion after trying a boat load of setup variants. YMMV.

3 Likes
8

I wonder about that, as well. For me, I have my Roon Core (Server) on a 2018 Mac Mini which is ethernet connected to the same switch that hosts my WD MyCloud EX2Ultra w/ 2x8TB 7200 RPM in RAID 1 (mirrored).

While I occasionally see delays with search (which I assume are caused by searches of TIDAL and Qobuz), music playback is instantaneous. Starting playback, switching tracks, switching to another album happens with zero delay, as fast as I can tap on my iPad Pro. Same with scrubbing within a track.

I have about 18K tracks, so maybe others have a much larger library and are experiencing something different. And, I am not adding local tracks to my library more than once a week, so that’s another consideration.

With my setup, performance-wise, I don’t see how anything would improve with direct attached storage for the music files themselves. Conversely, I lose the flexibility of accessing and updating my storage on the network, as well as the safety of mirrored drives.

As always, YMMV.

1 Like
9

Good move.

10

The beauty of life. To each their own…:slight_smile:

11

I also have my music on a NAS. The downsides I see are

  1. Roon doesn’t automatically detect when I’ve added new music. I need to do a “Force rescan” whenever I do that.
  2. When I do a “Force rescan”, Roon frequently ‘misses’ some of the music files (the total “Tracks Imported” count is less than it should be). I have to “Force rescan” a few times before it finds all of the tracks.

Perhaps this is because, instead of pointing Roon at the remote server, I mount the SMB share as a local directory (in /etc/fstab) and point Roon at that local directory.

12

  1. A direct connected drive will half the network utilization, meaning timing to the renderer is better controlled, and dropouts or clicks are far less likely to happen when the kids start a Netflix film (for example).

  2. Roon server makes the drive available as a network share in exactly the same way as a NAS does, so not true.

13

Does Roon let you control access to the network share? For the SMB share of my music on my NAS, I’ve granted Roon Core read privileges, and granted myself read/write privileges.

1 Like
14

No, guest R/W. Permissions isn’t a Roon speciality.

15

Safety comes with backups not with mirrored (RAID 1) drives.

3 Likes
16

So your unable to use it as a backup location and the drag-and-drop feature to transfer files to Roon is also not working (should someone ever try to use it in your setup).

17

I have a second SMB share (on the same NAS) mounted with r/w privileges for Roon Core. That’s where the backups go.

That’s true. But, then, I didn’t intend to grant everyone on the local network write privileges to the music library.

18

Technically speaking, the user account your Roon Core uses is exactly one user not everyone on your network. And again, safety comes with backups. Should another Roon user, or maybe even you yourself, ever mess around with your library and you have a proper backup available you can easily revert the changes. Having a NAS with data redundancy set up is no replacement for a proper backup. It’s still a single point of failure.

19

Umh, sorry. I was contrasting this with what Roon does if you put your music library in local storage: it publishes it as an SMB share with guest r/w privileges — i.e. everyone on the local network can write to it.

Backups are a component of safety.

You don’t leave your front door unlocked when you leave the house, just because you have homeowner’s insurance should someone come in and steal your stuff.

20

Where the house is usually your network and the front door is your router and the share just a drawer, which one usually doesn’t lock because of the locked front door. A thief who was able to break the lock on the front door will probably not face any difficulties to brake the lock on the drawer also if needed.

That’s the environment the Nucleus(+) and ROCK are designed for. Roon by itself (installed on Windows or OSX or Linux) does not setup a share for the library. If a user wishes to have one, he has to set it up himself.

1 Like