A kind fellow user on site sent me the articles on using Docker to setup a Core QNAP & Synology hardware. I found the following on sale at Amazon. QNAP TS-264-8G-US 2 Bay High-Performance Desktop NAS with Intel Celeron Quad-core Processor, M.2 PCIe Slots and Dual 2.5GbE (2.5G/1G/100M) Network Connectivity (Diskless). Would this be good candidate?
The usual questions: What’s your library size, do you want to use DSP, how many zones do you want to use in parallel?
2tb to 4tb library size. I would say yes to Dsp. Most files are Flac. Purchased some up to 24/192. Igb Ethernet. Others are cd rips. One Zone. Sources include Qobuz, Audirvana Studio, and Roon. Currently running Core on Mac Mini M4Pro. Setup a ROCK last year but had to recycle it. Looking at QNAP TS-264-8G-US for Core so can move that task off Mac
How many albums/tracks, local AND streaming?
I run the same CPU with roon, and for a reasonable amount of DSP, parallel zones and alike in roon, this should work fine if you use mainly FLAC, and don´t expect resource-intensive crosscoding.
If the Celeron will give a snappy performance with roon, largely depends on the number of tracks in your library, and its metadata structure, as @Suedkiez has correctly pointed out. As a rule of thumb, I would expect such a setup to be pretty performant and snappy with up to 50,000 tracks. lt might be okay with up to 100,000 tracks or a bit more, if your library is easy to handle for roon (almost all albums identified, not a zillion of credits and interdependencies per album, fairly standard size of albums, i.e. no big boxsets, and a flat folder hierarchy with mainly FLAC files).
If you library is bigger than 10,000 albums or 100,000 tracks, I would consider a more powerful NAS.