There is no real benefit to using an Optane SSD for Roon vs any other SSD. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan on Optane and have it in several of my workstations. But not in my Roon server.)
- Optane is lower latency, yes. But this basically doesn’t matter on a Roon system. The OS block cache will pretty much have all of Roon in RAM anyway (and by this, I also mean the active/“hot” parts of the Roon database), so you’re doing very little I/O to the SSD. Roon itself uses barely 1GB of RAM, so even on a system with only 4GB, most of that RAM is going to the block cache.
- Optane is orders of magnitude higher write endurance than traditional SSDs. (This is the main reason I use Optane in my workstations – not for the latency benedits.) This also doesn’t really matter on a Roon server. Roon writes very little data. Yes, it burps continuously to its log files, but this is still a trickle of data. And the database updates that occur when importing new music is pretty minimal as well – namely because most people don’t continuously import music 24x7. A steady-state Roon system probably writes a most a few hundred MB to backing storage per day. Optane endurance handles multiple terabytes per day. Even the crappiest consumer SSD can easily handle the write endurance required for a Roon server.
Optane is awesome. And it certainly won’t hurt to build a Roon server using it. But it’s completely unnecessary overkill that you are paying a price premium for.