I took a more than 11 year old Acer Aspire 8943G with 16 GB RAM and 2 SSD each 1 TB up to 1.4 million tracks. It has a Core i7-720QM (4x 1.60 GHz) and a Radeon HD 5850 (DDR3 VRAM). Great at the time, certainly not up to great technical standards today. It ran Windows 10 Pro and had no other tasks. Music was fed via 7 external HDD, I did it hard drive by hard drive and had to give up after the 4th hard drive at around 1.4 million tracks because the RAM was used up in the Core’s startup phase. Startup time and scanning the hard drives took about 30 minutes. Fluid work was no longer possible. The response became worse to unacceptable from hard disk to hard disk. The music was well sorted by artist. Hard disk 1 with the letters A,B,C Hard disk 2 with the letters D,E,F,G…Sampler on own hard disk sorted by decades. That was certainly a help for Roon.
Now I’m trying to get to the finish line via Linux Manjaro on current hardware XMG 16 x AMD Ryzen 7 4800H with Radeon Graphics with 64 GB RAM. There is also an RTX 2060 Refresh and 2 x 2 TB NVMe SSD installed. Currently, even 2 x 8 TB NVMe SSD would be possible. However, the prices will continue to drop until it is active to convert the 7 USB HDD. There are almost 2 million titles read in today and 28.4 GB RAM in use. The Core sleeps with me at night and is there in 7 minutes after power on. It scans for a few more minutes and then gets to work identifying the remaining 700,000 or so titles. In any case, it has become clear to me that powerful processors, fast SSD, sufficient and fast RAM bring significant progress.
I’m surprised at how responsive and powerful the Core has become with Beta 842, but that performance is still not stable with intensive use. However, with a startup time of 7 minutes, I would also restart several times a day, because many hours just on the PC would be unhealthy not only for Roon, but also for me.