Hi fellow Rooners,
I’ve used Roon for a few years now originally using on Mac then migrating to ROCK. I was considering Nucleus One, but noticed the 10k album limit (not sure if this is local or streaming). I have probably 15-18k local albums on my ROCK and it functions fine. Does anyone have trouble with a library of this size on Nucleus One?
Thanks!
I believe that the Nucleus One only has 4GByte of memory as standard. It can be be upgraded but you have to seek permission from Roon in order to avoid invalidating your warranty. See:
You don’t state what hardware platform is being used for your ROCK server. It is quite likely that your ROCK server will perform better than a Nucleus One - depending upon which particular NUC and what processor you are using and how much memory you put into it.
For example, I would expect my NUC11TNHi7 to outperform a Nucleus One. It has the same number of cores (4) but I believe that both the single core performance and all-core performance exceed that of the Nucleus One. In addition, it has dual channel memory whereas the Nucleus One only has a single channel memory architecture - which means that memory accesses on the ROCK/NUC are faster although this is not so significant as it seems because the processor memory cache aims to decouple processor speed from memory speed to a high degree.
If your NUC currently has 8GByte or more of RAM fitted using two memory sticks (in order to take advantage of the dual channel memory architecture), I would be think very carefully before exchanging it for a Nucleus One. If you get a Nucleus One and find that 4GByte is not enough memory, you will find that your Nucleus One crashes continuously.
At the end of the day, a ROCK system, once built and with the OS installed, is identical in operation, administration and maintenance to a Nucleus but it is possible to build a conformant ROCK system with performance that will exceed even that of the Nucleus Titan let alone the Nucleus One.
Local and streaming files count the same here because the metadata maintenance in the Roon database is the same for either.
Well, what ROCK hardware exactly?
This wouldn’t be super reliable because not all databases are the same. The number of unidentified albums definitely plays a role, but perhaps also other aspects of the library, such as the number of metadata links one has (which might depend on exactly the type of music one has in the library. Lots of classical albums may have a higher number of credits than if it’s all punk bands 
)
If I were you and already familiar with a NUC running ROCK, I’d just get a new and faster NUC. There is no difference in the software.
By the way, why exactly do you want to switch from your current NUC? (As you wrote, it functions fine).
Edit: As is often the case, @Wade_Oram beat me 
Thanks Wade,
Yeah I have an i7 Nuc with 16 ram. Good thing I checked
Thanks for the response. I guess it is aesthetics which may be silly. Would it be ridiculous to get an older Nucleus + in this day and age? ..I would assume they can handle large libraries but may have update limitations.
Even a Nucleus Plus (and, for that manner, a Nucleus Titan) only has 8GByte RAM - half that of your NUC - so again, you would need to be careful.
The Nucleus Plus has, I believe, a 7th generation i7 (might be 8th - I 'm not sure). Certainly not anything exotic by modern standards.
Thus it is quite possible (but not certain) that your NUC has better performance as well as more memory.
Does it have to be near the stereo?
Personally, I value having to mess with it as little as I can get away with (there are enough computers in my work life) so I chose a new fanless NUC, but YMMV.
By default the only thing they probably won’t get is RoonOS 3.0, but they can run any new RoonServer as of now. And whether you really need OS 3.0 (now in Early Access) is debatable / depends. (And if you’re comfortable messing with the BIOS, you could)
I was running ROCK on a tiny NUC. But after my library passed the 110k track mark (Local + Qobuz) I’ve noticed the system was slowing down a lot. (Intel N97 CPU, 12 gb RAM, 256 gb SSD, music stored on an external 4 tb USB hard drive).
I’ve ended up installing Roon on my Linux Mint server laptop. Whose i7 CPU has a far easier time handling my Roon database. RAM wasn’t the issue, as the NUC never crashed.
Unless I am mistaken, the Nucleus One has a CPU pretty similar to my N97. So huge libraries will likely become an issue. Mine only has just over 7.4k albums. And it already struggled with this. My i7 laptop just flies through Roon.
Yeah it sounds like I’ll stick with the nuc as I heavily use Roon for CarPlay and headphones while practicing golf. The new features for Arc are key for me.
Thank you all for the responses I greatly appreciate it!
Seconded.
If aesthetics are important in your position, I, personally, find the Asaka Plato series of fanless cases to be quite pleasing as well as being totally silent under all conditions (which the Nucleus One can not guarantee since, like the standard NUC case, it has a fan in it). My NUC11TNHi7 in a Plato case was, yesterday, running at a temperature of ~38 Celsius when the ambient temperature in the room was in the high 20’s Celsius - here is England, yesterday was the hottest day in May on record.
Just make sure you buy the variant appropriate to your particular NUC - the one linked above is for NUC 11 12 and 13 PRO series.
A NUC 13 PRO i5 or i7 (which is on the ROCK supported list) with 2x8GByte memory sticks in such a case would be silent and would probably outperform a Nucleus Titan in every respect.
Other fanless cases are available as well. Any of them would likely work fine if they appeal to you:
Thanks Wade! I will look into the suggestions