I’ve been running my Roon Server on a QNAP TS-473 for some time. My library is quite large (7900 artists/23000 albums) and I find the search and navigation to be quite slow. The NAS has 36GB of RAM and two 500GB M2.SSDs. The Roon DB is installed on the secondary SSD (the System being the primary).
I am looking for ways to improve Roon’s performance. Would adding a QNAP NVMe SSD PCIe expansion card and additional PCIe 4.0 M.2 Internal SSDs on the card do the trick?
Thanks!
Run a library of this size on hardware that follows the Roon specifications for very large libraries, not some old slow NAS CPU. The CPU is your bottleneck when searching and navigating, not the disks.
If the SSD where the internal database resides is not a particularly slow one, I see your NAS´ CPU as the only factor limiting performance. You do not write how many tracks you have, but everything north of 125k or 150k is most probably too much for the AMD CPU. The latter is less powerful than a fast Intel Celeron or N100 which are usually assigned with a 100k track limit.
If I were you, I would switch to a similar QNAP with a more powerful CPU such as a Pentium Gold or modern Core i5.
Thanks, @Arindal and @Suedkiez! Appreciate the responses.
So, I’m wondering if a spare i5 MacMini or i7 Dell Optiplex that I have would make for better Roon hardware while still keeping the music (230,000 tracks) on the NAS. Is that my takeaway?
It’s certainly worth a try. You can simply migrate your Roon database over to the new machine and try it out. If it sucks, activate Roon on the NAS again.
With 23,000 albums, though, I estimate at least 250,000 tracks, and:
This may be a bit out of date, though, and many people run 250k tracks on fast NUCs. Nevertheless, “as fast as possible” is not bad advice.
From:
Which in case of a QNAP NAS means rather a compact pro-grade unit such as the TVS-h674T-i5. It is surely a step up in price range, but these machines have really powerful CPU meant for computing-intense virtual environments.
Whatever new server you end up with, (not another Nas) I would copy the music to the new server and then backup the music to the Nas.
It could be a 2nd internal hard drive or a external USB drive.
That change alone will dramatically speed up your Roon search and navigation experience.
–MD
This is the route I am considering. A M2 or faster MacMini (or an Asus NUC with ROCK) with a USB JBOD for the music library. From there I’d back that up to the NAS (the opposite of what I am doing now). The $2k investment into another NAS doesn’t offer the same value.
Took @MikeD’s advice and added an M4 mac mini (256GB SSD, 8GB RAM - $529) as my Roon Server with the music directory on an attached USB JBOD enclosure. Things are whipping fast now (250k+ tracks). Thank you all who consulted here!
This topic was automatically closed 36 hours after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
