I have been happily tinkering with my overall system for over a year now. I put my NUC together in March which has an internal SSD with the Core on it and my library is connecting via USB on a 3TB spinning drive. I have been thinking about adding a NAS to my house network as I need a larger HDD location primarily for films. I was wondering about ditching the USB Drive and having Roon Core point to the NAS instead but I gather that may come with a few issues, and from reading around some that might affect SQ. Anyway, this reading around also got me thinking perhaps I should think about a NAS for backup purposes only (currently use the Cloud and PC). So, my first question, will a NAS add much noise to my overall network (cat 6a cable)?
Secondly, it also got me thinking that I should replace my 3TB USB external drive with a 2.5 internal SSD to sit inside the NUC. My second question, should I consider changing to an internal SSD 2.5 drive and if so, which one? My current music collection is around 500GB.
NAS vs external USB drive will not affect SQ in any way, shape or form. (Assuming you keep all this in a different room from your listening location so you donât get audible mechanical/fan noise.)
The caveat with NAS is auto detection of new/changed files in your music library may be delayed. If you donât care about that, or are willing to go into the Storage Library settings to manually click ârefresh nowâ, then this isnât an issue, either. Keeping your music on a NAS also gives you extra control over file access that you donât get when using a locally attached storage. (E.g., make a âRoonâ user on the NAS, export the music share to that user as read only. Now Roon canât modify your source music library. Create a second share on the NAS called something like âRoonBackupsâ and give the roon user read-write access to that share. Then configure Roon to perform its scheduled database backups to the RoonBackups share.
Also, the NAS will almost always be configured for drive redundancy, which gives you some survivability for the most common failure type without having to restore to restoring everything from backups.
At first I pulled my music from my NAS because the music was already located there.
It worked aok with no issues. Then I read on this forum that Roon does not modify your files and all of your edits are are stored in the Roon database.
Then I also read that if you delete a Album or music file through Roon, then after multiple warnings you then delete the actual file on the NAS or wherever you have it.
So I copied my music to an external USB drive on my Core and used my NAS for the backup.
A by product of this change was my Roon navigation was noticeably faster than pulling from my NAS. Instant
Now I will always either pull my music from a internal or a local USB drive and use my NAS as a backup.
I have my library in a Synology NAS. Every word that cwichura has said is correct. When I add music to my library it is not shown at once in Roon, but eventually it is shown. I can always push the âRefresh nowâ button if I am in a hurry.
In order to reach the NAS, Roon may act as an SMB/CIFS client, but I am using another approach: My Roon Core runs over Debian Linux, not ROCK, and I have mounted the remote file system, i.e. the music library, so Roons access it as a local file system. In the first place, I mounted it statically with fstab, but some times the library was not mounted, so I started using autofs and now the library is always available.
My Roon Core hardware is a NUC with an M.2 drive for the OS and the software and a SSD drive that I donât use for now. I would move the library here in the future if I would want to have a one-device configuration. For now the library will remain in the NAS with RAID support.
Thats correct, its in a separate room (well, an internal wardrobe actually).
This is one of the main attractions really if not the key reason.
This is really interesting, I donât really want to slow things down! I am leaning towards a NAS anyway now, so I could always add it and try it I suppose.
I think an internal SSD still interests me, I can then re-purpose the current USB.
I would strongly suggest just trying your NAS. Roon library browsing is all done from metadata stored in the Roon database; not from the actual media files themselves. So having the media on a NAS should make no difference in browsing performance, since the NAS isnât involved. The NAS will make library scans/analysis a little slower, but thatâs generally a one time thing for each track in your library. And itâs also something that is done in the background.
FWIW, I have my music library stored on my NAS (a Synology) and my Roon Core accessed it via SMB. I have ZERO performance issues when browsing.