Currently, I run my Roon Core on a Synology DS918+ NAS which also stores my music library. As the library is quite small I have yet to run into any problems with this setup. But to future proof my setup I’d like to set up a Roon ROCK. My intention is to leave my music on the NAS and link it to the ROCK as an smb share.
As my Synology powers off at night and reboots in the morning, would this cause any problems for Roon and the smb mapping in ROCK? Or does ROCK simply re-map the drive and continuous the monitoring once the Synology is back online?
I could not find anything related to this in the KB so any help is appreciated.
So I’ve never done what you’re suggesting here, making the library disappear and reappear regularly. However, my experience has always been that when a file location went missing that Roon just didn’t show those albums, and when it reappeared to Roon so did the albums. Transparent, fast, smooth; I had music on a NAS that would shut down for a few times a month for a variety of reasons including a hair trigger UPS. But the added wrinkle of every night, I’m not sure.
What I would say is, if you’re going to the trouble and expense of a ROCK, seems like a no-brainer to move a copy of your music to an external USB SSD (cheap drive, cheap enclosure) for a variety of reasons. Then do periodic incremental network backups either to NAS assuming ROCK-attached USB is your master, or otherwise. Makes it far easier to sneakernet offsite backups. Also less network traffic (if you’ve ever had hiccoughs). All convincing to me unless you have >4-8TB of local music in which case keep it on the NAS. I only have about 1.8TB and my growth rate is slowing rapidly so I don’t expect to need more than a single 2TB for years.
You can get a 2.5 SATA enclosure for under $20 and an NVME enclosure for around $10. Cheap cheerful easy to return or replace if they don’t work. Then you can listen to music at night on occasion quiet thinking of it, eliminate a lot of network load when playing hi-res, take a full copy offsite for peace of mind (NAS bring redundancy to failure not true backup). Get the full benefits of the ROCK.
Of course your path will likely work just fine. I’d try it, and keep good backups.
Thank you Johnny for this very comprehensive answer. This makes me quite hopeful that my desired setup works so I will first try how reliable the re-mapping of the network directory works on a daily basis before moving over to an external USB drive.
I have my music on a DS720+ and I’m shutting it down every night after the roon backup. No issues at all with mount points when using the NAS IP address. But, using the NAS hostname was failing sometimes and I think it was a matter of timing.
As for the remotes, the only thing I may recall is with the macOS roon remote app that I have to reopen it every morning as it’s crashing most of the times. I guess it tries too many times to reconnect? Don’t know, too minor to investigate it for me.
Also, I do have to note that it is not recommended to turn off and on the NAS on a daily basis. I do it though to feel a bit more on the green side and save some energy costs.
Lots of folks have preferences. Don’t think there is a right or wrong way. I prefer to use an internal SATA 4tb SSD in the NUC/ROCK server for my music library and a USB attached SSD for backups. If I had a NAS it would be for backups.
It will work fine they will just be offline when Nas is off. One thing is that apps not on NAS don’t not get real-time updates from storage over the network so when you add new music they won’t show up until Roon does it’s next rescan. You can set this interval in the storage settings. So you have to force manual rescans to pick up new stuff where local storage instantly picks them up this is what stopped my using my Nas for music and video storage it’s now just a backup of them and I use local drives for Plex and Roon.
Yeah maybe that’s what I’m going to do down the road. Will try first and see how it works. I am not adding new music constantly so forcing a rescan once every while sounds ok for me for now.
Heard that too. HDD Hibernation is off for that exact reason. But turning it off once a day should not really put too much strain on the HDDs. It’s the constant spinning up and down caused by hibernation for example which should be more problematic.
Nothing wrong with this approach. Very good chance it will perform well after all for you. You will always be able to move your music to the Rock down the road and then backup to the NAS if you choose.
One other plus not mentioned about local music on the Rock is that the user experience will be a lot snappier and instant. When I first started using Roon I was pulling my music from my NAS and I thought it was the invention of sliced bread. When I move my music to local it was like the entire system was replaced even though it was the same hardware.
Hmm. I feel as though I’ve been told here multiple times that there should be no influence of music location on “snappiness”/responsiveness of interface pre-playback. Because I don’t think there’s any touch of music files until play is started. If you’re talking about lag between hitting play and audio starting, I can see that potentially. I was in your camp- feeling that there had been a difference when I moved to local music. But if there’s no traffic going between music files and everything is at database level prior to play, then I thought I must’ve been imagining things. Anyways, I’m very happy for many many reasons that I switched to local (if external).
With regard to the sound reproduction it is the same. What I am talking about is the navigation of Roon, Images load almost instantly. At first when I was pulling from the NAS I did not think anything was wrong. Navigation seemed normal to me. No lag I thought, but I went local the user experience for me was very noticeable.
When you talk about local you mean using an external USB drive with the ROCK? I would have loved to see a NUC with two SSD slots so I could internalize the storage as I am not sure I’d like to use a removable USB drive as that setup seems a little bit improvised to me. But maybe that’s just me
Sorry, but to clarify are you describing a switch from (a) core on ROCK with music files on NAS to (b) core on ROCK with music files local to ROCK, or are you describing a switch from (c) core on NAS and music on NAS to (b)?
If you’re describing (a) to (b) which is what I thought you were describing, all the images and data were already local (on the SSD that was inside your NUC), and any navigation wouldn’t have touched anything other than your remote and your ROCK. This is the misconception I had. If I’ve misread what you were saying and you switched from (c) to (b) then definitely yes 1000%.
I couldn’t agree more with the idea to have your music local to your rock setup. Then use your NAS as you backup and setup a recurring sync to your local music.
The best way to have an trouble free roon system is to have a solid network and simplify your Roon core setup complexity. Others may disagree of course.
You mention both an SSD for storage in your Nucleus and a NAS.
I use Synology. Synology’s “File Station” applet can mount my ROCKs data folder using CIFS. My understanding is that RoonOS mounts additional storage (secondary SSD, external drives) as folders under Data\Storage.
I’m curious if you’ve ever tried mounting your Nucleus on your NAS and, if so, if your secondary SSD shows up. If it does, this might make it relatively straightforward to copy between a NAS and a Nucleus/ROCK using rsync or some other file copy strategy on the NAS.
Sure, I have had the NAS mounted as a drive on the Nucleus.
Just as a backup when I didn’t have the drives completely synced.
Still there, AFAIK, doesn’t do any harm.
However, for syncing between drives, on one or more computers, I always control that from another computer (a Windows machine, that also has a copy of the music library; and sometimes a Mac, that also has a copy).
The Nucleus is designed as a Roon appliance, for data management a mainstream computer is better, I find.
And this is the picture they provide to illustrate it:
What I’m curious about is if that nested folder, which in your case is the mounted secondary SSD, also shows up on the NAS when you mount the data folder from Nucleus using CIFS.
No worries if this question isn’t clear or it if it’s a pain to check
I don’t know, I’ve never done that.
I don’t use my NAS as a computer, it’s just a dumb box to me.
But the Roon drive shows up on my Windows computer, and on the Mac, just like you suggest.
And it shows up in my iPad and iPhone.
And the NAS folders do too.
So I would assume that the Roon drive can show up on the NAS as well.
But I can’t check that right now, I had surgery on my foot and I’m not allowed to put weight on it, so I can’t go downstairs to fiddle with the gadgets, the only device in reach is iPad.
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Thanks. I have not checked all available NUC series and models but all that I see available only support a single SSD. This internal SSD is reserved for the ROCK and Roon Database and cannot store the music. At least as I can see, with a NUC the only option to store local music is with an external SSD. Not too bad but not tidy either.
