I’ve been using Roon now for about 6 months or so, running it as a docker on my unRAID server, and its worked flawlessly. I’ve purchased a lifetime subscription, so I’m all in.
My unRAID server is getting a bit long in the tooth, and I’m worried about downtime if I had to rebuild my array, which would mean going without music for a week or two until I got a drive or drives replaced and the system back up and running.
I’m interested in a standalone system running ROCK, using whatever hardware I can find/afford, and I’m looking for advice.
Constraints are:
Needs to be able to handle 150k + tracks (to allow for growth), and TIDAL connectivity
I connect via ARC often for listening in the cars, or when remote (i.e. work, cottage, etc). Not sure if that has any impact on roon server hardware requirements.
may play with DSP in future
Typically play 2 or 3 different streams at the same time: (home office/living room/wife’s home office)
I’m only interested in Intel processors as I’ve had issues with AMD in the past
I’m fine with a refurbed system.
I’m in Canada, which has a bit of an impact on availability and pricing of systems. I’ve found some refurbed systems on amazon.ca, but most of them are gen 6-8 processors, which I think may be too old to handle my requirements.
An i7 Gen8 like the one Nucleus+ is utilizing should do this job with ease. Later generations are not necessarily advantageous particularly those i7/i9 with lots of cores which do not offer a significant improvement in single-thread performance.
To be honest, your other thread is what got me looking at putting together a small mock system. I’m trying to find something comparable to your asrock system, as they’re not as cheap or available in Canada unfortunately. I’ve seen some refurbs, like this Lenovo ThinkCentre 920 on Amazon.ca. It has:
Intel Core 8th Generation i5-8500 Processor (6 Core, Up to 4.1GHz, 9MB Cache, 65W)
16GB DDR4 2666 MHz Memory
256GB Solid State Drive (SSD)
Windows 10 Professional 64 bit
Lenovo Factory Refurbished
Its $329 CAD, but would need a larger drive for the database, I think, as well as upgraded memory to 32 GB. I expect I’ll need a 4TB internal drive for my music as well, but that’s the same regardless of which system I purchase.
Connectivity: Ethernet
This one is $475 CAD, and would need a memory upgrade to 32GB, as well as a 4TB drive for music.
I’ll see what I can piece together the Asrock system here in Canada for, since its new and not refurb, it might make sense to put a bit more money into it. I am under some wife-imposed financial constraints however, so I have to keep the cost under about $750 CAD or there abouts.
Thanks @Steve_Brawn
If you are constrained by a limited budget, you could always forego the 4TB SSD for a Seagate External HD for the time being, That would save you around 200 USD that you can use to maximise the performance of the MOCK.
Seagate external HDs have a full SATA Interface (some WDs do not), so you can shuck the drive, mount it directly in the MOCK and do away with the USB to SATA interface in the enclosure. If you are not partial to shucking, you can get a 4 or 5TB Barracuda, which is what the external drive contains. The drive being SMR should not be an issue for this application.
I don’t think the performance of the disc that holds the music is crucial to Room SQ. The library is held on the local SSD and the music disk is only ‘stressed’ when updating the library, which is not that often. During playback, no stress on the disc.
Still looking, and waffling. At the moment, I’ll looking at a NUC 11 from Amazon (NUC11PAHi5).
Its a bare system, so looking at adding:
one 16GB stick of memory
a 256GB M.2 NVME drive
an external USD SSD drive for music.
I have a 4 TB USB SSD with a backup of my music on it, but its virtually full, so I’ll need to go to something bigger within the next 6 months as my library grows. Eventually, I’ll see about adding an internal sata SSD, but for now, they’re super expensive, especially once you get to 4TB or beyond.
Price for this is $640 CAD or $460 USD. A bit more than I’d hoped to spend, but as long as its stable and usable long term (3-5 years), its probably a worthwhile investment.
An added bonus of putting a NUC together is that it will be portable, and I can take it with me to the cottage or on vacation, and use with a travel router rather than relying on ARC.
Any feedback or advice? I’m probably a week or two away from pulling the trigger.
This is probably plenty of memory. However, you may get a small performance increase by adding another 16GB stick so that you get double the read/write data rates compared to the single stick of memory (2 x 8GB is generally better than 1 x 16GB).
If you want to go to capactities higher than 4TB, you may be better off with a USB HDD. They have more than adequate performance for local library storage and you can get capacities significantly higher than 4TB for the same price.
The only downside to a HDD instead of an SSD is the mechanical noise which may be an issue if you want your Roon Server to sit in your listening room.
Following up as I’ve finally found a solution. I’ve purchased a NUC, and plan to run ROCK on it:
Intel NUC 11 Panther Canyon NUC11PAHi5 Mini PC with Intel Core i5-1135G7 (16GB RAM+512GB)
Constraints are:
Needs to be able to handle 150k + tracks (to allow for growth), and TIDAL connectivity
I connect via ARC often for listening in the cars, or when remote (i.e. work, cottage, etc). Not sure if that has any impact on roon server hardware requirements.
may play with DSP in future
Typically play 2 or 3 different streams at the same time: (home office/living room/wife’s home office)
I’m only interested in Intel processors as I’ve had issues with AMD in the past
I’m fine with a refurbed system.
I’ll be putting my music on an external USB drive for now, but may eventually put it on an internal SSD once prices come down, and size goes up. I have a 4TB USB ssd right now, and it doesn’t quite hold a full backup of my library.
I’m going to turn off the Roon docker on my UnRaid server, and use the NUC as a standalone instead. I’ll have to set up some sort of sync/backup solution between the NAS (where my library currently resides), and the external USB on the NUC (where I’ll point ROCK to for my music).
I won’t get a chance to start on this until early December as I’m out of town, but really looking forward to getting this working!