Having finally Mocked my i5 desktop I can conclusively say the performance is well and truly an upgrade over using Windows 10.
The most noticible place is when clicking on an album - it used to take a couple of seconds for the ‘Versions’ text to display, whereas it is now microseconds. A far better experience.
The only pain was that I had to convert my USB disks to exFat. I could not get Rock to recognise anything as NTFS. Thankfully all of these work now but it did take a few days after formatting to copy the music back to those drives.
Of the five USB flash drives I have, two are recognised by Rock, the others do nothing regardless of the file system. No big deal as I only wanted one for database backup purposes. The speed of the flash drive may be an issue though, first full backup is at 97% after nearly 7 hours. Hopefully the following incrementals will be in the order of minutes!
Edit:
One recommendation I do have is that if you’re using a completely separate drive for the database backup and you’re worried about the size of the backup, format the drive with the smallest allocation size possible.
The first time backing up to a 64gb flash drive I stopped it at 74% as it had used 20gb, so an estimated 27gb for a full first backup (crude guestimation!).
Second time with the drive formatted with the smallest possible allocation size, the full backup is 13gb.
Quick question about my otherwise perfect MOCK set up.
When the Roon App loads on my iPad or phone it always takes a few seconds to load the home screen (you get the rather snazzy animated Roon logo). It isn’t a big delay, and everything responds smoothly once it’s loaded. The system is 100% stable in all other regards.
Could this delay to load the app be caused by the responsiveness of my MOCK server? If so, I can look for a RAM upgrade or something. I don’t believe there is any way that I can monitor the load on my MOCK device (a Lenovo M600 Tiny, running an Intel Celeron N3010 Processor with 4GB RAM) apart from the processing speed with DSP (ignore the random EQ settings ). As you can see, it is processing at ~x35, which seems well within capability.
This is where the cpu is likely the issue…roon recommend at least an i3 sandy bridge - I run a MOCK on an i5-6500 with 8GB and its pretty snappy even with my large 250K+ library
An update on my MOCK server running on a Ryzen 3 3200G in a microATX case. Been running Roon now for some 18 months and the MOCK server for the vast majority of that time.
I wish there was something exciting to report but it’s just been absolutely bombproof. It just works. My NAS drive failed so I now run an external HDD plugged into the server but other than that and in terms of the OS itself it only restarts when there’s an update. Other than that it just purrs away 24/7. Really very very impressed.
Unless I’m listening in headphones I don’t do any DSP as I leave that to HQP and it runs very snappily all the time. To steal another company’s motto - it just works…
Can someone please confirm if Roon Rock can be installed on a Gigabyte B550i aorus pro ax configured with a 5700g and Realtek RTL8125 2.5gbe controller.
Anyone tried an HP Prodesk 600 G2 (Intel Quad Core i7-6700T) to run ROCK? They have some renewed ones on Amazon for just over $300 right now with 16GB and 256 SSD
I basically upgraded just the HD to an SSD and installed Bodhi Linux with the Linux Roon software on it. Since this was upgraded the memory usage dropped from what usually was maxing out my sparse 6Gb’s to < 2Gb’s. Performance is very nice now.
So I think they did a good job with the Linux Roon software!
For those of you who are interested I have configured an AMD Ryzen 5600g in a Gigabyte B550i Aorus Pro Ax with 16GB DDR4 RAM (probably could have used a single 8GB stick; (cant get 4GB sticks?), 256GB M.2 (future proofing?), and 10TB N300 Toshiba NAS drive (super silent and very cool). The case is a streacom fanless FC5. Currently running DSD256 upsample and it runs very cool. Legacy option in the BIOS was not an issue but I have to use a USB to ethernet adapter since Rock does not recognise the Realtek RTL8125B NIC is not supported. Still early days but my experiences with Daphile and HQPlayer showed the AMD Ryzen CPUs to sound more ‘analog’ than the Intel ‘digital’.
FYI, the Roon “processing speed” dropped from 5.9x in DSD256 to 3.1x in DSD512.
OFF TOPIC ALERT
… now if you paired that with optical Ethernet, it might even beat the best LP systems out there …
Just couldn’t resist - go ahead guys.
Intel Core i5, Noctua heatsink and fan, MSI motherboard, Silverstone HTPC Case, SSD for the OS, HDD for internal storage, CD drive. Overall, a fairly affordable build. Roon ROCK runs beautifully and handles my approx. 2000 CD library effortlessly. I did make sure all hardware was compatible with relatively recent Linux kernels.
Sorry to only respond to this so late…
I had a similar issue. In my case it was not the PC. I was running powerlines connected to the core. Once i switched to a mesh system there is no delay when openimg Roon App (on Android). Maybe your problem is similar. Try to connect the Core directly to the router via ethernet and see if the problem persists. If so, then is the way you are connecting the Core to the network and not the CPU or RAM.
Thanks. Yes, that’s what I did in the end and it works very smoothly. In fact, the MOCK now runs off an ethernet switch that hangs off a Google Nest wifi router (in turn driving a whole home mesh). Works seamlessly in every room.
I actually also run a powerline to my study upstairs (not that I need it really).
I upgraded my MOCK the other day to a DELL 3040 MICRO MINI Tiny PC Core i3-6100T with 4GB RAM.
It’s now snappier than my old Celeron N3010 MOCK, but there’s still a bit of hanging when things load. Not so much to bother, but it is slower than using the native Tidal app on my Windows PC.
Right. My MOCK is on a Gigabyte BRIX with i5 7200u and 8GB of ram. Its very fast with no hanging and as fast as Tidal app. I used to have hanging with the powerlines but not with the mesh system. My house is small though…have you tried to connect MOCK directly to mesh unit instead of the switch? Just to see if the hang is the same…
Just an information to others using Gigabyte BRIX mini pcs. In my case i had to attach 2 USB pens to the BRIX to be able to install ROCK. One with the ROCK image and another with GParted live usb. For some reason, with only the ROCK pen i couldnt get to instalation screen. With both the option to boot from the pen in legacy mode showed up
). As you can see, it is processing at ~x35, which seems well within capability.
