Interesting. I thought the Nucleus One was using a Celeron processor. Difficult to get specifics, so perhaps Roon Labs reserves the right to change parts over time. Either way, I suspect these GMKtec units are similar in performance, give or take.
I expected the M.2 2242 slot to work with capacities greater than 2 TB also (why not?), but according to GMKtec’s website:
Agreed that M.2 2242 SSDs will be more robust, but I don’t think that matters as much for music storage. Critical for Roon’s database since it’s constantly writing and rewriting to the storage. But, as far I know, there’s no limit to the number of times microSD flash storage can be read. I would expect durability for read-only applications to be similar between the two storage technologies.
I think I understand your testing methodology better now. Your plan is to continue using your existing Roon server for listening to music while you alternate your second Roon license between the two GMKtec options. That sounds reasonable to me. Enjoy!
The N100 is of the Celeron-family. So indeed you are right. And Roon does not want to go into detail of the used processor in the Nucleus One, as this may indeed vary in the (near) future.
The M.2 to show in the picture are all PCIe-type, but they don’t fit in the GMKtec G3 Plus. It has to be M.2 2242 SATA. And I bought one of 2TB for €157 (incl. TAX).
This is much cheaper than when I wanted to by the SanDisk 2TB Extreme Pro (€226 incl. TAX).
Learned how to use CloneZilla to do a backup over network to NAS of a full drive. That was fun, educational, and pretty durn quick. Worth doing - it’s dirt simple, now I have a Windows image sitting there for kicks. I always forget that my wired network to my office is running at 100MB/s instead of the rest of my house which runs at gig speed, which doesn’t matter until it does. Reminder to get to that wire checking / re punch-down job that I keep putting off. Still took 10 minutes of prep and 20 minutes of actual backup. Woulda been probably 2 mins if I’d used a local device or had gig speed or moved my computer to a different network connection.
Installing ROCK (um, MOCK, um, not sure the usage) and getting it onto early access was a dream. Didn’t have to much with BIOS or even F7 to get into boot menu. With USB in front right USB port, it just found it and went to work. Faster than any other install I’ve done.
Haven’t restored from a backup in a long time, but totally straightforward. Took longer than I thought it would - running over network again, but also just I think my library is bigger than I recalled with all the streaming stuff I’ve been adding, accumulating more bandcamp rips, etc. I used to have 99% free space on my 256GB drive, now it’s like 94%.
This thing runs dead quiet. While I was planning to have it in my server cabinet it’s so damn cute that it’s hard to put it away vs. keeping it on my desk.
Most importantly though…
It’s not faster at most things, but it’s faster at some. DSP seems totally capable - I’m not doing heavy DSP ever really, and it’s absolutely fine for what seems to me heavy sample rate conversion and conolution and it’s in the 40-50x even if I am running that in two zones with different music, which I never would. But for browsing… well, the album view is WAY faster. scrolling through is silky. Loading a new album is subjectively slower. And some things feel very slow to open - like Roon playlists.
I’ll play some more. But for 99% of people, I think they should buy this for <$150 and be in the ROCK/MOCK business with even less fuss than official ROCKS.
Thank you thank you, this was cheap and awesome.
EDIT: It seems like it’s getting faster and faster. No background analysis going that I’m aware of, but a couple hours in and I might say that it’s better than my 7i5 NUC. The memory speed now that a lot of stuff is cached might just be superior. Off to the races!
Ok… so when it works it definitely seems snappier. What I was looking for.
But…
It often seems to go to sleep or something where I just get the spinning squid on the controller and I have to go restart the room server from the web admin page to get it to respond, and then it takes a few minutes.
Is there a bios setting that I can change to keep it from going to sleep? Or is it something else? Did you have this experience?
That’s really strange. I have four of these N97s deployed in friend’s and family’s homes. No reports of this behavior so far, but I’ll ask them to confirm.
I’ll check. Thanks. It’s actually weird - the device just went into the “unrecoverable spin” while I was browsing Gram Parsons just now - meaning I loaded one album just fine then another and it went into pause mid-paint. But clearly the rock is still functional because it’s playing just fine. I’ll do some digging in bios (which I haven’t touched yet) and report back.
Ok, current state is that I think it’s fine and has been for a few hours. I had it stuck behind an L3 switch while I set it up. Usually I find that what gives when I have a network issue is that playback suffers way before interface, but in this case it was the opposite.
These two steps (none specific to the GMKtec) seem to have made it settle down to being I think stable (fingers x’ed) and snappier than my old 7i5:
moved it to plug directly into my core switch
Cleaned up library (120 files gone)
Deleted all my “my live radio” stations
This has nothing to do with the GMKtec, but my logs on this new device were full of the following line repeated over and over millions of times. After I deleted the radio stations, logs said it rebuilt something and now all seems fine again.
Quite literally millions of times in a row, dozens of times every 100th of a second. No wonder it wasn’t responsive. I don’t listen to live radio on Roon anyways…. Just goes to show that there’s all kinds of ways Roon can get into a bad state, but if you futz you can find your way out.
Sorry for the roundabout adventure, this device is great! All my issues are Roon business as usual - I’m going to recommend this as a regular ROCK substitute - don’t know if team Roon would test it, but it’s an easier install than the regular NUC, as you pointed out in your initial note!
That’s crazy. I have a half-dozen or so live radio stations (including one for my turntable via rooPlay). Just checked my logs, and I’ve not been able to reproduce that issue. Sounds like a pretty bad interaction between Roon Server and at least one of the radio stations you had in your library.
I’ll be speaking at AXPONA in April with my digital audio partner in crime, also named David. We’re doing a fairly free-form seminar on streaming digital audio. I’m sure the topic of the N97 will come up.
I just tried to get this some more visibility on the forum - I do think that this should be easier than a NUC for 99% of people. But mods (understandably, correctly) construe this as tinkering - even though I think it’s un-tinkering. Ah well, I really appreciate all you’ve done and think there should be a LOT of these sold. Not sure how to best “promote”.
I bit the bullet and purchased a G2 Plus N150 (256GB, 12GB of 4800 MT/s DDR5 ram) for my second home. It’s cute, it’s in red / white & blue, and it has a MARGINALLY faster processor than the N97.
If you’re interested in the N150, I recommend trying this G2 Plus version first - instead of the G3 Plus, which paradoxically despite the higher number but have slower RAM (which seems to matter in this Roon application). Get DDR5 memory is the key.
If you want this form factor and DDR5 memory, you can get it on Amazon, albeit with a 512GB SSD (pure overkill) so it’ll set you back $150 while the spring sale is on. (Price is $229 with a $70 coupon).
If you’re really interested, the GMKTec web site has both a spring sale going on for the next ~4 days, and they have bulk discounts - so if you bought 5 N97’s they would be $120 each, free shipping. Of course you don’t have Amazon’s returns, but thought it might be worth knowing. Here’s the link to the “right” N150 with DDR5. You can also find the N97 with DDR5 memory on the same site.
@Tony_Fardella
According to me, it will also be able to be used as MOCK, but you have to test it.
I think that one M.2 has to be used as the main drive on which ROCK-software is installed.
Another M.2-slot will then be the Internal Storage on which you can put your local music. I do not know how Roon will coop with the 2 remaining M.2-slots. Perhaps they will be added to the Internal Storage, but that has to be tested by someone who is using it as a MOCK.
If you are going to buy it, please keep us informed.
Good luck, Frank.
I was thinking you could use one SSD module as a volume for the ROON server and database. The other 3 (or 2 or 1) could be set up as a single volume for music storage. You could then use an external SSD drive as a backup drive.
Definitely not making any promises whatsoever, but if you feel like a lark, GMKtec is running “blind box” sales for April Fools. $99 or $299 and you don’t know what you’re getting…
