I am looking for a new NAS, ideally QNAP but will not rule out Synology, on which I can load Roon. I am struggling to find a QNAP model (2 bay) that meets the spec of i3 or more with 4Gb RAM and that will accept SSD’s.
Can anyone please help me in finding a model of QNAP or Synology that meets that spec so that I can cost it up? If anyone can point me to the SSD’s to be installed in the NAS also I’d very much appreciate that.
Personally I would sugget that you give more details about the size of your library and number of endpoints plus any DSP options you might be wanting to use like upsampling or convolution etc.
Yes, this is exactly what I did in the end: Although I managed to run my Synology 218+ as Roon Core the performance (due to for Roon Core purpuses underpowered CPU) was never acceptable.
I ended up with buying a Cirrus7 Nimbini 2.5 (a fanless NUC built in Germany) which is running as Roon Core and don’t have any problems anymore. The music library is still stored on the NAS.
I am looking at one of the ones from InsideTech and I can spec one up to 17 with 2TB SSD for the same cost as a QNAP (around £1200). That’s a fanless one that seems to get good reviews but I am buying blind as I know very little about them or what the best option would be.
I have no experience with InsideTech but I am extremely happy with the quality of the Cirrus7 Nimbini 2.5 with i7 , 8GB Ram and 250GB internal M.2 SSD (for running Roon). As far as I do understand this is more or less the same hardware configuration as the Nucleus+. There is space for another 2.5 inch SSD which I don’t use as music is stored on the NAS.
Total cost of this configuration is below 1.000 EURO: https://www.cirrus7.com/mini-desktop/cirrus7-nimbini-v2-5-media-edition.html
I went with a NUC with ROCK, with my Room Music initially on a QNAP 2 bay NAS that I also used to (previously) run Asset UPnP on the QNAP (still running but no longer used as Roon does everything). I subsequently put a spare SSD I had in the NUC and moved the Music to it. Now use the QNAP to host music backups from Roon, plus Roon database backups, plus my Software library and PC backups.
My Local music library is unlikely to grow much as I stream mainly form Qobuz and Tidal.
NAS connected wirelessly to the NUC or via Ethernet? So far I’m running the core on a Synology 1817+ with upscaling to 768kHz and no issues. But I’m starting to dabble with room correction and might be using a convolution filter on TOP which likely will bring the Synology to its knees.
Bay 1 hosts the SSD for Roon;
Bays 2 - 4 are for storage so I can use RAID 5.
My point being that you’d probably want at least 3 bays in some configuration to take advantage of a NAS’s features, like RAID - so 4 isn’t really overkill.
It works reliably, is resilient and I have no regrets or plans to change
QNAP TS-473 - seems to handle everything I’ve thrown at it so far! I did add a bit of RAM a couple of months ago (mostly because I was bored) but it was performing fine with the 4Gb it came with.
