Found a good deal on a NUC8i7BEH with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD. I’m not super happy with the speed/performance on my QNAP NAS. The NUC comes set up with Win10. Two questions.
How best to install Roon should I just start fresh and lose my history and playlists? This won’t make me happy but if it is the best solution I’m fine with that. If back up and restore is the way to go anything special to know ahead of time?
Anything to be aware of with the ROCK install. On the QNAP I just went to the app center and installed it. Being that Win10 is on the NUC will ROCK download just do its thing and kill off Windows? I’m not worried about losing the Win10 license, no plans to use it for anything besides Roon.
Can I expect faster connects between Android Phone and Roon during playback, faster browsing of Discover/Artist/Genre/etc. more responsive volume control with the 8th gen i7. How about less time between all of the annoying “squiggly Roon progress thingy” overall?
basically you have to deploy ROCK, backup your current DB then migrate (restore) your DB to the new ROCK instance: https://kb.roonlabs.com/Migration
I do have a QNAP NAS and can’t believe those are even considered as Roon Core options, you will get way better performance and better overall user experience.
Even Roon Server running on top of windows will deliver you way better performance.
I started out my 14 day trial with Roon running on a pretty nice, but old 2012-ish i7 laptop. Seemed fine but everything was new and exciting. Old NAS was getting full and quite old. So I spent days finding what I thought was the right balance between cost and performance. Others here said Roon ran fine on same exact QNAP. I guess all users are different. First pass I thought the QNAP was okay but not great. Lately it has just been painfully slow. Not sure what changed.
Wish I had just stuck with a new NAS for storage and gone with optimal Roon device from the start. I’m skipping i3 or i5 and going all out with i7. Hopefully trouble free for a couple of years. Roon is starting to be a money pit for me. Ignorance is bliss, right?
in my experience Roon Core would not be that demanding on CPU resources (i3 would be fine I would say), Roon DB would appreciate an SSD, the faster the better, I ran the core in a windows i5 PC with a SATA3 SSD on it (500Mbps -/+ read speed) and it went fine, one day decided to move the core to my iMac 2019 i5 as a Parallels VM running ROCK with 2 vCPUs assigned to it, I did noticed the better performance I think due to the faster NVME drive in the backend (almost 6 times faster). Some users in the forum will say from SATA SSD to NVME they felt no difference.
Both my i7 Laptop and NAS have SATA SSDs in them, so a spinning drive is not an issue. I just think the NAS is good at storage, not good at applications. I’m not doing DSP or anything, but the price difference was small and my frustration level was high, so i7 Gen 8 NUC it is. I’ll post results in a week or so. Hopefully it will be positive.