My experiences with Rock and a 500k+ tracks library

Logs are written in RoonServer/Logs.

Putting them on a separate volume is a pretty small optimization, though. I wouldn’t worry about it, personally.

Might be. We are going to put our stuff in whatever Windows thinks of as %LocalAppData% (You can do Start->Run and type that in to locate the folder). Moving the user’s folder is definitely a cleaner way…

At least on Linux, RoonServer rotates log files when they hit 8MB in size, and keeps a maximum of twenty. So you won’t really gain much here. You’re looking at a max of 160MB for the logs…

@brian,

I just became a lifetime member or Roon a couple of months ago. I did so after a very brief trial run of Roon on a Synology DS1513+ which has an Atom duel core processor with 2GB RAM. It is way underspeced for what you recommend…and it worked just fine. Good enough for me to give no thought to purchasing a lifetime Roon account. I followed some advice and upgraded to 4GB RAM and moved the core to a SSD. I keep the music files on the spinning disks. I do occasionally have some slow performance but it is never horrible. I just have to wait a few seconds. This issue could be many things. There are a lot of things happening with Roon. It could be a slowness issue with Tidal or the Internet outside my home. It could be issues with the wifi inside my home. It could be the NAS too. But overall it is very good.

I don’t understand this aversion to using the NAS. It seems like forgoing the good in search of perfection. Frankly if I needed to buy more hardware to make Roon work I would have not used it. The fact I can use my existing hardware for a very minimal investment got me on board, and I’m very happy. Roon sounds great. The benefits far outweigh any issue I may have using an old outdated NAS. Thank you for a great product.

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I do want to point out that you are responding to a post about using a NAS to hold the music being played by RoonServer which is running on a different PC; not, about using the NAS as a RoonServer.

In your case, your music IS local to the RoonServer; so you are not going to run into those issues. Now, if you pointed the RoonServer running on NAS1 to music stored on NAS2, then you would run into the same issues.

Thank you for this information. What you are saying was not clear to me. I was responding to Brian’s post, “I hate NAS’s for music storage. I know that some people like them/need them, and we do support them, but I wouldn’t use one for Roon (or any software trying to manage 50-100k+ music files) for myself, regardless of library size.”

To me that comment was about the NAS in general, and not about a NAS connected to a server. But perhaps I am not I understanding this thread.

My complaints in that post focused on problems related to accessing NAS’s over the network from a core running elsewhere. Those problems do not apply when the Core has local access to the files.

You might find this interesting:

Well… getting pedantic about the acronym NAS – but it’s useful pedantry in this case – NAS stands for network attached storage.

Since the filesystems in a NAS box aren’t network-attached to that box, they’re local – the NAS isn’t acting as a NAS from the perspective of processes running inside that box. The storage is only network-attached on external hosts the NAS box serves.

I could imagine there being issues with running RoonServer on a NAS box related to the CPUs on NAS boxes often being lower-performance than the CPUs on current generations of general purpose computer, but I understood Brian’s earlier remarks to be about issues with storage mounted via the network versus local storage. But of course, IANAB (I Am Not A @brian).

Hi Brian,

Thanks for providing this information on Rock.

I have a large music library and was previous running my core on a Synology DS3617xs with some success. To reduce power and reduce some of the burden off my NAS with the Roon core struggling, I thought I’d try running it on a Rock system.

So I built up one using a Intel NUC i7 (Intel BOXNUC8I7BEH3), 32GB RAM, 4TB SSD, 256GB M.2. The larger SSD drive hosting my Master music and all the MP3’s stored on my NAS.

With my collection now over 1 million tracks, the Rock core is running out of steam and becoming sluggish. It’s purely the shear quantity of music/database entries.

My question is, have a reached a maximum limit to Roon or is it just this hardware configuration? If it’s hardware than can you point me to an ideal core hardware configuration that will not expire with a growing collection? If the limitation is Rock software, are their any improvements forcast?

Regards,

Zera

Probably should tag @brian for you here. Maybe going with a non NUC solution could be the best option but if it can’t run ROCK maybe a Linux build or you might need to go with windows.

There is now an i9 version of the SonicTransporter. But with a library that big running off of NAS’s, just juicing up the CPU may get you nowhere.

Roon 1.7 on the latest RoonOS will outperform any other platform out there, including other Linux systems, other manufacturer’s Roon Core devices, and MacOS/Windows.

We have ~10 libraries out there that are this size. 1million tracks is REALLY big, but should be doable with the right gear.

You will want a faster system than the NUC.

Which would be what?

That seems like a pretty hefty system.

The NUCs are quiet and small. You will want a much more powerful CPU. One with a heftier fan and cooling system. One that doesn’t have total system TDP of 15-30w, but more like 125w just for the CPU. The Intel Core i9 9900K comes to mind. You will want fast RAM, and the fastest NVMe SSD for the Roon database.

1 million tracks is about 100k albums, and at even $12 an album, that’s over a million dollars of music! I think budget is not really a concern here. Good thing, since this will be a very expensive “computer”.

It will also be noisy and hot, but maybe it can be liquid cooled. If you are doing all this, you probably want to skip the NAS and go DAS.

I’m sure there is a dealer or integrator that is willing to build and maintain this for a fee. I’m sure I could find you someone if you really needed it… or you can go at it by yourself. Be warned though, this is a very different task from buying a NUC and installing some RAM and drives.

You’d also need to make sure your ethernet chipset was compatible with RoonOS, but that shouldn’t be a big deal unless you chose to get exotic.

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How do you back up something this size?

And how big, approximately?

I see your point. A Xeon system rack-mounted in the basement was what I was thinking. But you have to stick with something RoonOS will run on, right?

you will have trouble finding fast NVMe drives that are small. For example, this is the type of thing you get if you don’t care about price:

It only comes in 512GB and 1TB – and 512GB is more than enough. Get the 1TB if you are worried. The cost differential is tiny compared to the $thousands you are going to spend building this system.

Yup, but RoonOS will run on most things if you get the ethernet chipset right. You want the best single-core performance, good-sized cache, and fast RAM/SSD.

same as eveyrthing else: 2 copies – one local, one remote.

Have a computer or NAS doing the local copy over SMB from the RoonOS device once in a while, and then use something like BackBlaze to do a remote backup.

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Yeah, maybe.

I use BackBlaze. There isn’t enough time before the sun goes cold to do the first back up of a million tracks.

After that, the incrementals are quicker.

I do too. I have about 20tb of personal content (as opposed to OS files that are easy to deduplicate) stored there. It took more than a month, but I forget exactly how long. It’s not something I really thought about and before I thought about it again, it was done.

I’ve restored about 4tb in the past and it was pretty fast. I just had an 8tb drive of photos die on me today. My wife knocked spinning drive off desk while moving things around. Ugh. I’ll be doing a 6tb restore next week.

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Hi Danny
Which option of Backblaze you using , Cloud or Backup?
Dirk