Background:
Long-time Roon subscriber with many generations of upgrades.
Currently 140 library FLAC files organised in 30 Genres at root level.
Latest upgrade to running ROCK on a NUC12WSKI7 with Thunderbolt, 32GB RAM.
Purchased G-Drive Pro 6TB Thunderbolt external drive with the goal of no longer running network access to a NAS. The reason for this was that I found that the NAS was causing a steady background noise - perhaps as Roon was polling for updates?
The G-Drive works fine with all the files and when connected to other Thunderbolt-enabled computers here. However, I have NOT been able to get the ROCK NUC to recognise the files on the G-Drive. The ROCK is set-up following the Rock Install Guide. Roon on the Rock has no problem with the NAS drives and their data.
Does anyone know of a reason why Roon ROCK would not recognise a Thunderbolt (externally powered) drive as the storage device? An expensive mistake on my part!
Thank you for the bad news everyone
Here was I thinking that an all Intel NUC was the gold standard!
I swear it worked for about three days. When it stopped, I reset everything. No luck. Then I reinstalled ROCK, making sure that I followed the set-up directions.
Then I fully reformatted the G-Drive and recopied everything over to it.
Now I have a large, grey, brick!
Not surprised… Some of the problems on this nuc are probably shared with Intel’s buggy firmware. I have been reading about Maple Ridge thunderbolt 4 firmware right now being buggy as sh!t. All kinds of problems with NVM36 are being reported. The older firmwares are less buggy. A newer NVM41 is being pushed in bios updates that drops thunderbolt 1 & 2 support.
Not sure if stability is improved on 3 & 4 though. There is a NVM38 floating around which still supports all thunderbolt versions…
So far it’s showing with ASUS and gigabyte boards, but beware, it seems that intel is dropping thunderbolt 1&2 support.
The G-Drive Pro is using Thunderbolt 3 and the Intel NUC12WSKI7 supports Thunderbolt 4.
I assume that means it is backward compatible with Thunderbolt 3.
FFK, I did not see anything about an NVM38 or 41 anywhere - what is that and what does it do? NUC Virtual Machine?
Danny, is there any NUC that is not wonky with Thunderbolt 3+?
I can run ROCK and use the previous WD Elements drive, or…
I can run Roon on Windows if that is a better solution
I just need A solution that will work well for the library I have
Nothing you can directly mess with. It is the firmware version the thunderbolt chip is on. Depending on the board generation different firmwares may be applied… usually by bios updates. Most cannot be reversed. It is usually advised to not update bios if you don’t have to. I was just letting people know intel is dropping 1+2 support and not really making it known, people are finding out after a bios update and by then it is too late. Also Maple Ridge is a mess compared to Titan Ridge.
If the NUC12 has thunderbolt 4 then it is the Maple Ridge controller, which has been know to have buggy firmware compared to Titan Ridge which is thunderbolt 3.
At any rate thunderbolt 3 works on thunderbolt 4. Where things sometimes get buggy is dependent on the thunderbolt chipset on the device and the chipset on the board. Some don’t play well together, this has been more problematic with Maple Ridge than with TItan Ridge.
If you have having issues with the drive acting funny connected by thunderbolt, you could always use the USB 3.2 Gen 1 connection which will give you 5Gbps which should be more than sufficient to use with the demands set by audio streams and storage.
Hi Peter, Did you try the GDrive Pro connected via the usb connection instead of thunderbolt? That’s what I was suggesting to rule out whether it was the drive or the thunderbolt connection.
