Hello. Not posted on here much but I’m in need of some advice. I have an Intel Nuc running my Roon core. Recently I have started downloading Wav’s to the internal storage rather than streaming and now I’m looking to get a dedicated storage drive and wondering what’s best. Is directly attached better than network attached ? Was looking at an QNAP DAS 4tb. Are then any gotchas that I should be aware of ? What sounds like a good starting point size wise. Any advice is gratefully received. Thanks
Sorry couldn’t work out how to add this to a relevant category
There’s no generic thing like “better” in your case. It really depends on your needs and maybe future plans.
BTW, you could also add more internal storage to your NUC, depending on the spec. model.
I personally prefer a versatile and flexible solution here, using a multi purpose NAS. You can do so many different things with a NAS, plus storing your music files. Enable SMB, and map spec. music folder to your NUC. Works great. In case you’d choose an x86 based NAS you may even run roon server on this as well.
Arguably, directly attached storage is “better” than a separate NAS. The files must pass through the core so direct attached storage will reduce network utilization. The simplest thing to do is just add a 4TB drive to your NUC.
In case you have a rather slowish or already maxed out network bandwith, that’s correct.
And keep in mind if you really want a silent storage, you want to choose Flash based drives, already standard with external USB storage, but for NASs still a bit expensive compared to HDDs.
I’ve connected a 3 tb USB powered Seagate portable hard drive to my little Roon NUC. It handles my 2.1 tb local library perfectly fine.
I have a second copy of my music on my huge media drive connected to my main NUC. Copying files is easily done by using Windows Explorer and connecting to \Rock.