Intel NUC D54250WYK

Hi,
Have tried to read up but without success. Will this NUC be useable for Rock/ Roon?
Brgds
Tom

Hi Tom,

I have exactly the same model running ROCK fine. Only issue I’m still fighting with, is to get HDMI audio working to my old Pioneer VSX-1123-K. Apart from that, it works fine, also tested with USB DAC without issues.

Update: … and after posting, I got the HDMI part working too, go figure :man_facepalming:t2:

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Hi, the NUC is a 4th generation i5 so it should have more than enough grunt to run Roon quite well. ROCK should load just fine and give you a decent user experience. However nothing older than 5th generation devices are officially supported. So while it should work if you do have issues Roon wouldn’t necessarily go out of their way to fix it unless the same issue affected newer NUC hardware.

If you still choose this model even knowing it is not officially supported, beware that you need a variant that supports both the SSD (mSATA) for Roon OS and a 2.5" drive for music.

Unless your music files are all on a NAS, then you don’t need an extra 2.5” SSD. Who wants their entire collection on a single SSD anyway? When you mount a NAS share, you have the extra benefit to do automatic backups of your library (which is handy when that mSATA decides to fail). Also, the newer official supported NUCs all have NVMe, which isn’t the same as mSATA (only the M.2 slot is the same)

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Oh my - there are many approaches. I used a NAS for many years for music storage, including my early days using Roon. But I now run ROCK on a Roon-supported NUC, and use a single USB SSD for, yes, storing my entire music collection for Roon. The USB SSD attached to the NUC is backed up automatically nightly, and its SMB share is readily accessible from any PC or Mac on my LAN. Performance in all aspects (granted, I only have a 15,000 track library) is instantaneous.

Thanks a lot guys👍🏻 Will go with a newer, supported model then
Brgds
Tom

I just set up a new Nuc8i5BEH and I am pleased with the performance and how quiet the fan is.

Is this existing hardware you already have or looking to purchase?

If existing, then it should be able to run ROCK and work. I initially used a DC3217IYE, “Ice Canyon” 2nd Generation NUC with an i3 CPU. This NUC is out on loan, still successfully operating ROCK for a friend. I presently use a NUC5i3MYHE, “Maple Canyon”. This is with a NAS based library of 85k tracks (6.5k albums). I have also benchmarked this NUC, as shown in other postings, with up-converting, down-conversion and DSP in parallel in multiple zones, giving as good figures as later NUC generations and i5/i7 CPUs. Most of the differences in later NUC generations were for graphics performance (not needed when running ROCK as a headless server), on-board WiFi (the recommendation is to use wired connectivity, so irrelevant, as with Bluetooth 4.0 or 5.0 support) and other features not used by a stripped down OS based embedded app such as ROCK.

If you are looking to purchase, then yes go for a supported NUC range, such as NUC7 or NUC8 but unless you have a massive library is anything above an i3 required. The extra performance just generates more heat, and doesn’t seem to give any benefit to a ROCK based system. Remember also ROCK has been out since 2017, and has not changed much in this time, as RoonOS based on Linux, as a 20 year old OS, is pretty stable and not subject to any major functionality advantages. Probably the other way round, as it will optimize performance and give more in embedded applications.

So a NUC7 or NUC8 with i3, 8GB RAM and a M.2 256GB SSD running ROCK will meet the use case for 99% of Roon users today.

And if you can pickup a used NUC5 or NUC6 already configured with 8GB RAM and a SSD, then installing ROCK will wipe any existing configuration, and save some money over new or ridiculously over spec’ed unnecessary hardware purchases.

If you already have the Gen 5 NUK and a 2.5” SSD then that will work fine. No need for M2 SSD as long as your music is on a NAS or even better on a USB drive connected to the NUC.

Why is DAS better than NAS?

Nothing to manage daily backup jobs from one RAID1 NAS volume to another RAID1 NAS volume (different NAS unit for total redundancy).
Nothing to manage permissions to the music library
Nothing to manage the volume (I have consistency volume checks & volume scrubbing jobs)
Nothing to allow Remote Access to the music library

The only way DAS would work for me, is if that the NAS volume was the master then the networked DAS drive was kept in sync - but then you are introducing additional network traffic through the NUC.

Nope, I’ll stick with NAS thanks.

USB3 is significantly faster than a NAS very close to internal SATA disk. There is no permission restriction on the USB drive connected to the core if you are running ROCK. But the speed difference is most apparent while the analyzing the files. YMMV.

Using the NAS for backup is a good idea (and also have to mention that you should keep another backup offsite before someone go on about Backup procedures)

But you have do this once at a big batch, when introducing Roon to your library and then for each incremental add, it is probably the same.

My initial Roon database build was 5-years ago, where it was being indexed by Asset (it still is, in parallel to Roon, as fallback to UPnP with the Naim app, if required).
Prior to that, it was LMS with Squeezebox endpoints.