I have the NUC10i7, 32GB Ram and a 5TB external HDD. Not using Windows. I have ROCK installed, a simple setup without issues from a WindowsOS.
I would highly recommend 16GB ram at least.
Oh, and another top tip that isn’t mentioned a lot and yet, I have only just set/switched on the other day - “Restart on power failure” from the BIOS settings. That way, if the unit looses power (be this a power cut), as soon as power is detected again, it’ll boot and restart the Roon Server. I tested this a couple times when setting it up and it’s worked well. As I have a trip coming up for a month out the country.
After thinking this through, here’s what I’ve come up with—and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Current Setup:
Intel NUC with Intel i5-6260U (6th Gen) @ 1.8 GHz
8 GB RAM
500 GB SSD
Windows running ROON Core
Music stored on NAS
Proposed Upgrade:
Lenovo Workstation with 11th Gen Intel i5-11500 @ 2.7 GHz
8 GB RAM
900 GB HDD
ROON ROCK with all music stored locally (backed up to NAS)
From there, I plan to upgrade to:
16 GB RAM (adding 8 GB)
2 TB SSD
Questions:
What are your thoughts on this approach?
Any hardware recommendations?
Side Note:
You all have been a huge help so far—thank you! As for backup and RAID, here’s a quick story: Last week my wife came upstairs and said something was beeping. I logged into the Synology NAS DSM and, sure enough, a drive was failing. Ordered a replacement from Amazon for same-day delivery, hot-swapped the drive, and everything is back to normal.
Just to note that this would be considered a “MOCK” system, since the Lenovo Workstation is not officially supported by Roon Labs - only Intel/Asus NUCs are officially supported for ROCK.
There is no support for partitioning hard drives in ROCK. The “first” drive will be used for the OS solely and an optional second one will be configured as a watched folder for your music files. The 900 GB HDD is for sure more than big enough as OS drive but as Roon is a database based application, lots of non-continues reads of mostly small amounts of data, it is strongly recommended to run Roon Server (and for ROCK the OS disk) on an SSD for acceptable performance.
If you want to go the one-disk-for-everything route or want/need more control over your PC, also potentially get better hardware support than you might get from ROCK that is designed for other hardware, install a common Linux distribution of your choice and then install Roon Server for Linux on it.
So I would need 2 drives one for OS and one for music storage? If so, that changes things a bit. So even if I went with ROON Core, I would at minimum want to get an SSD for the operating system.
I know it was mentioned that there are mini computers that work well but even when I price one of those out, along with SSD or external HD for storage and RAM as needed, its well into the $400 range. It seems that regardless on which route I go, I will end up spending $300-$500 to upgrade the system.
Hi.
I’m new on this forum but used Roon for 2 years now (I still think about continuing my subspcription for 2026). My ROCK runs on NUC with 32 GB RAM, Intel I7 13th gen. My files (music, video, pictures docs etc) are located on Synology NAS (1522+ and DX517 extention unit, both with different RAIDs). NUC, NAS and other important network devices (switches, laptop etc) have static IPs. So far I didn’t noticed any problems with Roon. I had also Roon installed on my NAS (ROONonNAS site has apps to download for different hardware) and it was lightning fast on my 1522+, much faster than on NUC. This is normal as with Roon on NAS files are stored locally, with ROCK on NUC files are stored remotely. Unfortunately my storage pool on Syn has corrupted several times because of hardware problem (NAS had to be sent for repair) so I decided to change my setup and now run ROCK on NUC.