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.
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.
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.
Hardware configuration. With a library that size you will need to build a custom desktop unit. NUC CPU’s are mobile (aka laptop) CPUs. Desktop CPUs are much beefier (and take up more energy; thus needing more cooling). Others have weighed in, you can check out my current configuration, if curious The Soul of a New Machine. Picture of the build a couple of posts previous.
In the 1.7 notes, it was indicated this is due to switching from Mono to .NET Core. Is there any reason you don’t support .NET Core on other Linux systems? E.g., .NET Core RPMs are installed from Microsoft’s repo, couldn’t your start wrapper bash script check for that and use it if it’s found, falling back to your private Mono distribution if not found?
Good to hear it’s the intention. I wondered about why it was ROCK-only at the moment. Seems it’d be easier on you folks if you only had to support one .NET runtime, since you don’t have to do double testing and all that.
Another option is to make ROCK friendlier to KVM by including the virtio drivers (at least for scsi and net). KVM has really low overhead as a hypervisor, so instead of you having to worry about what system the user is running, let the hypervisor abstract it from you. Someone building a big system with direct-attached storage is likely to have stuff like an LSI-based RAID card managing a RAID6 array for the raw music files, for example. That just becomes transparent to you as they pass it through to the VM as a second virtual drive.
(I still would like to see stand-alone Linux support .NET Core, though. Even ROCK in a VM is still not my preference as a 20+ year sysadmin, since you have ROCK so locked down…)
I didn’t really want to move to a high-end PC just to run Roon as I already are running a NAS 24/7 plus the Roon Rock NUC core and was trying to reduce power. My NAS previously had 36 6TB HD’s and recently upgraded with 24 x 14TB Toshiba enterprise HD’s. This setup uses considerably less power than before and seems faster.
From what I’ve already seen, moving to the NUC with the Rock core has already outperformed the Synology DS3617xs NAS running the Core. With promises of the Roon Rock optimised dedicated firmware still being improved, this gives me hope.
Switching to a high spec PC is always an option but I’m prepared to wait and see how Rock develops.
Just out of curiosity, how does one curate and enjoy a library of a million files and why?
(Besides the somewhat snobbish question of how one enjoy MP3 at all? )
If we speculate here, each song lasts an average of three minutes, thats 50.000 hours. If you listen to music continously for 8 hours a day your library would last about 20 years until a song/album would be played a second time. And i thought i played a lot of music!
@ Mikael_Ollars
… I just have a lot of MP3’s and a fair bit of 24-bit content as well. Roon is for music, just because I have a lot doesn’t mean I shouldn’t store & access it on Roon as life time subscriber. So you propose that I should only store hi-end quality music on Roon. If the answer to that question is yes than I guess you are a snob.
If you hook your Tidal account into Roon, you’ll add 40-50 million tracks of music, no one would expect you to listen to them all.
Just for clarification on my own observations when using the NUC ROCK with a large database, Roon seems to be sluggish when importing music. The import phase seems pretty quick when importing from the NAS, after then when it’s processing the new material I guess it scans the content and updates metadata etc. that things get s-l-o-w. I have it set it to only use one core for processing.
I can only assume the bottleneck is with the functionality of inserting/modifying records in the Roon database. Therefore, would running the core on a i9 processor necessarily make it any faster than the i7 on my NUC with M.2 NVMe PCIe Gen 3 SSD storage or is it that a full PC Windows implementation of Roon Server uses a better/faster Database method?
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