The install script specifically looks for a HDD to install on. It won’t make USB, SD card, or on board memory selectable for install. That said, it is almost certainly possible to side load it onto any drive using cloning software. But I suspect any subsequent update would fail.
I’m not sure if this qualifies as “strange” but I just succeeded, in a surprisingly straightforward process, to install ROCK on a fanless quite old PC with just a mini motherboard including an mSATA SSD, but no other hardware at all.
It had been my Roon Core running Win10, but the mSATA died. Rather than attempt to reload Windows and get it re-registered I thought I would try ROCK.
Carefully following the KB guide, with slight adaptations for non-NUC equipment, it just worked. There was a bit more rebooting than the KB guide seemed to indicate, finding access to the folder for the codecs was not as easy or clear as the KB implies, and the database restore took about 9 hours I think (I was asleep when it finished), but it is over 20GB for 185,000 or so files so fair enough, and above all the restore process worked perfectly.
I did the codec installation after the restore, as I struggled before that to find the folder access (not enough rebooting I think), but it would already playback music files from the NAS before the codecs’ installation, however Live Radio failed until they were installed.
Really impressed with ROCK, and how it removes any system admin for the box running it. I am not aware of any shortcomings in the database performance, which seems as fine as it was under Win10 with the same hardware, except the failed mSATA was only 80GB as well as being about 10 years old.
I am still disappointed with the lack of flexible options for Roon’s interface, among other things, brought home by a temporary return to JRiver while waiting a new mSATA, but I was still mighty delighted when Roon was back in operation. I had especially missed the album and artist profiles. As for ROCK, I have no reservations at all in applauding it.
For the record the hardware used is
Fanless heatsink case
Asus H81T mini-ITX motherboard, updated to last BIOS revision (from 2016!)
i5-4570T CPU 2.9GHz
2 x 8GB RAM DDR3-1600
128GB SHARK mSATA SSD
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I just bought a second hand computer from my local “recyclery”. They sell used computers from the municipality in my town here in Sweden at very reasonable cost.
I gave €200 for the Dell Optiplex 3050 SFF and got a Samsung 970 EVO Plus m.2 NVMe drive and a couple of 8Gb Cruzer DDR4 RAM sticks (not necessary, there was already one 8Gb RAM stick installed)
I installed the m.2 disk and RAM and then it took the whole of three minutes to boot from an existing Roon USB install drive, and then install ROCK! 
When Roon was running I shut the PC down and installed my WD Red 6Tb media drive in place of the Dells original Hynix 128Gb SSD. Unfortunately I needed to initialize the 6Tb drive from ROCK’s GUI, even though it was formatted with ETX4FS previously. Something to do with keeping the ROCK experience seamless and appliance-like I was told.
However, once initialized it was an effortless task of connecting to the ROCK server from a Windows 10 machine holding a copy of my media library. A couple of minutes spent on a robocopy script (and turning Roon Server off from ROCKs GUI) and copying was on its way. It took 15 hours to copy almost 5Tb of media over 1Gbps Ethernet.
This morning I started Roon Server and then restored a backup of my database.
A small adjustment of the Storage paths had to be made but identification and analysis went smoothly.
At lunchtime today I had a running ROCK server with an Intel Core i5 6500, 16Gb RAM, 250Gb PCIe m.2 boot drive, 6Tb media drive and a built in optical drive for ripping! It works great and punches really well as a host for 150K tracks and around 11K albums in various resolutions.
Performance figures shows upsampling of RedBook to 24/192 at 50x processing speed, to DSD128 at around 8x and to DSD512 at 2.2x processing speed.
It is nearly quiet, except when ripping, and draws around 15W when idling and about 25W when upsampling to DSD128.
In short, an excellent Roon Server and ripper at very low cost!
Oh, I added its data to the Performance Matrix linked in this post:
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It’s gonna freeze a hell of a lot.
…owwww…
I think when it’s done it will be really cool.
Adding my successful install on Lenov m92p tiny.
How can I add new firmware files to ROCK and activate a Broadcom wi-fi chips?
As it is Linux based OS I think it is possible to add new firmware files like BIN, Config files into the system disk with SATA to USB reader.
Yes, It Seems like that any x86 pc is available to ROCK as long as the BIOS supports Legacy boot.
Well, these are the kind of things where I think why wrestle with a closed-down system which does what it has been designed and configured for, but not more nor less. That’s the kind of things where a multi-purpose OS like Ubuntu Linux is so much easier and more configurable. That’s the main difference between ROCK and a multi-purpose Linux distro you asked about on another thread.
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which wifi chips is supported by ROCK? as we are not able to add specific drivers to ROCK, better choose the right hardware.
What’s the betting on ROCK running on a Ryzen NUCalike like this ? My guess is that the Linux part would run, but drivers would be all over the shop.
Hmm, i think it’s time to shed my distrust for AMD, they seem to to really have begun to “get their crap together” as stated in the clip.
I’m still in the “AMD pulls power like water heater and run as stable as a Yugo from -74”-camp, but try and have an open mind.
I had an Athlon64 which I liked, but have been Intel for 2 or 3 computers since. I just ordered a new PC with a Ryzen R7 3700X. It’s got a 65 watt TPD so I’ll have to look elsewhere for my water heating needs.
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I think the most anyone can say is that the chips that are used in the supported NUCs are probably supported, although that may not be the case for the NUC 8 and 10 models.
See:
- We recommend using the onboard ethernet, but support for some USB ethernet and WiFi adapters is included. Some of the above NUC7s have built-in WiFi, which we may support, but once again, we recommend using ethernet and not assuming WiFi works here, or is an acceptable solution for Roon Core connectivity.
(ROCK KB Article); and
I was an Athlon64 fan and I admit a tendancy to support the underdog. That said, their processors were so bad for so long that I caved and bought Intel. Pragmatism means that my last upgrade was a Ryzen 7 but only as they now hold the bang for buck higher ground again.
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Hello, am new to Roon and really enjoying the interface.
However, being a tinkerer (and always looking to save cash ) I’ve installed ROCK onto an old Lenovo M600 Tiny (https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/pd100929/) running an Intel Celeron N3010 Processor with 4GB RAM.
Works perfectly with my Sonos set up (Sonos Connect V2) and other mobile devices, but intermittently fails to start my Chromecast Audio devices when selecting a new track. The play button moves to “pause” but I have to stop and start it again to get the track to play from Tidal (I don’t maintain a local library). Works much better when advancing automatically down a play queue.
Any thoughts or advice gratefully received. Thank you for reading this and I hope this is the right place to post this. If not, please let me know where I should. I know that the Lenovo is prob under spec’d for ROCK.
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How is the core connected to your network?
Ethernet cable over powerline network
The only thing I can suggest is you try a direct connection to your router/switch and see if the situation improves. I use Powerline adaptors with no problems but others have had issues.
Yup. It was working fine when I had the box on Linux Ubuntu, but I was having trouble getting Remote Desktop to work, so tried ROCK. Actually, thinking about it, you could well be right. On Linux it was running on Wifi. Might well be the Powerline…