Okay, my lack of technical knowledge of NUCs has let me down slightly here. Anyway, I bought a pre-owned NUC 5i5RYH with 8GB of RAM and 128Gb SSD, which I thought would do nicely for ROCK. The seller kindly updated the BIOS and installed ROCK before sending it to me. I’m awaiting its’ arrival.
Having now learned a little more about NUCs I’ve just worked out that the SSD in the one I’ve bought is, in fact, a 2.5" SATA drive. I realise that the instructions are to install ROCK on an M2SSD in the other slot in the NUC and leave the SATA space for a storage drive.
So, will the current arrangements work ok or have I blundered and need to buy an M2 drive and start again?
Well that’s good to know for now, at least. If I subsequently wanted storage too, presumably it would then make sense to add M2SSD for ROCK OS and re-purpose the SATA SSD (or replace with a larger drive really).
I am using a gen 4 NUC with 2.5" SATA drive and have not had any problems and performance is good with my 200K library.
So I see no reason to switch to M2 SSD. If there is a bottleneck it is not the SSD but more likely the processor if I wanted to do DSD512.
Don’t let Audiophile paranoia get to you
Paul, they have really said it all but you will have a nice fast machine for ROCK and if you want to add storage then USB 3 drives are cheap. You can always keep your eyes open for a cheap pre-used M.2 SATA and take the storage internal but it will be a minimal difference, more convenience over performance.
Thanks all. Well it has arrived and I think I have it up and running now after fumbling around a bit and adding the ffmpeg codec file, plus restoring from a database backup. I haven’t actually tried to get any sound out of it yet Just about to connect up my Meridian Explorer 2. Do I just delete Roonserver in its entirety from my laptop now and then leave Roon on there as a Remote?
Just to pursue this a little further, perhaps someone could straighten me out on a couple of things. Given that ROCK is running on the 2.5 drive, could an M2 drive be added for storage to save me having to start from scratch with the Operating System on the M2 drive, or would it not be sensible to run it that way round? Also, on the subject of M2 drives, I’m a little lost with PCIe, NVME, AHCI, SATA etc and how any of that lot is better/worse on a 5th generation NUC running ROCK.
A generation 5 NUC has to be M.2 SATA. The alternatives won’t work and might actually kill your NUC’s PCIE port. I’d rather not discuss that further!
I am not sure it makes a huge difference with M.2 SATA vs. a SATA HDD but without taking mine down and launching an experiment I can’t say if it would definitely work. I do think it would make a difference if it were the later and faster type of cards.
My unferstanding is that Gen 5 supports PCIe NVME but I don’t don’t really understand what they are and how each is better (or not) than the other in this usage.
Gen 5 is M.2 SATA only. Gen 6 adopted the newer faster cards. Essentially in lay mans terms PCIE NVME talks direct to the CPU, SATA has to go through a controller which can add latency and is often shared.
For clarity, M.2 SATA uses the PCIe bus but via a SATA controller.
I already have a Vortexbox Ripper/NAS, so I’ve already got the equivalent of external storage. Just exploring the option of not having to run both the NAS and the ROCK machine at the time. You hit the point of part of my question with your other comment - i.e. do the different drive standards make a difference in this usage? If they don’t and SATA is as fast as anything else, can I just use an M2 SATA drive for storage seeing as the operating system already resides on the 2.5 drive?
Just about to connect up my Meridian Explorer 2. Do I just delete Roonserver in its entirety from my laptop now and then leave Roon on there as a Remote?