G’day from Australia., hoping that you guys can help.
I have decided to build a dedicated NUC for Roon, a 24/7 set and forget server that will just run in the background without further thought, i.e. shutdowns reboots daily as I’m currently having to do with a multi functional daily driver of a desktop PC
I am after setting up a headless unit plugged directly into the router in the study which will then feed my SoTM SMS 200 Ultra in the music room via ethernet.
I intend to install my 2Tb SSD drive with my music library directly into the unit itself so the M.2 will be for the Roon Rock OS only
Can anyone who knows anything about setting up a dedicated server (I’m clueless in some respects) see anything wrong with this order? I ask as I think all should be ok but I read somewhere (can’t find it again) that not all NUC’s are supported.
Are you getting an i7 as you are intending to have a big library, do heavy DSP, upsample and have lots of zones?
You might be better going for a gen 8 nuc as the processors are faster…
Personally I think the power supply isn’t needed, but others will differ.
Because of my familiarity with Linux, I have a similar setup except I loaded Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS & Roon Server instead of ROCK. There’s no audio advantage to doing this. I just like the extra control I have to tinker with the box. The TeddyNUC PSU didn’t exist when I set mine up so I have a Teddy Pardo 19/3. It’s a quality piece of equipment that many people would argue is optional. Because of the flaky power grid I live on, I opted for some power conditioning in my system because I figured it wouldn’t hurt.
The only thing that I would do differently is that when I was I noob, I decided to acquire the most powerful NUC that was recommended at the time (7i7BNH). The nuance that escaped me was that NUC’s come in 15 & 28 watt models. The lower powered ones can be passively cooled. The higher ones require fans which can introduce unwanted noise depending on the location of the NUC.
Because I can ssh into my NUC and monitor it (something you can’t do with a ROCK), I know that with ~60k songs, my Roon processes usually hover around 8~12% of the CPU. Roon is definitely not stressing the box at all. If I had it to do all over again, I would have chosen a 15-watt i5 processor and passively cooled it with an Akasa case. The commercial Nucleus devices sold by Roon have an i3 or i7 option. For me, the i5 would have been a nice middle ground and I feel more than adequate for my needs. I have hi-res files but I don’t do any heavy DSP processing.
David, I would just take Roons recommended hardware suggestions and click on the Amazon links provided. Very easy, and totally supported. Then just continue with the Rock Installation guide.
I’m thinking of this bundle but with an added stick of ram making it 16 gig.
Having 16gb or RAM won’t hurt anything and might be nice if you ever decided to repurpose the NUC for something else in the future. But here’s an item from the ROCK documentation that might be of interest if you’re trying to save a bit of money:
My NUC is currently using less than 2GB of RAM with almost 6GB free. And that’s with a full copy of Ubuntu Server & Roon Server running (instead of ROCK).
Hi David,
If there are options you would suffice with a m.2 stick of 64Gb or 128Gb. Both will do just fine as OS and database location for ROON OS.
Otherwise the recommended package will do just fine.
Lack of ssh access and NFS are the key reasons I’ve ignored ROCK. I need local filesystem access to my music files for a variety of reasons, making an appliance OS unsuitable for my needs.
I periodically run a Python app to extract all tags from all files and write the lot out to a table against which I run a series of sql scripts to augment and maintain metadata consistency, which is then written back to the underlying files
A bash script then adds a second to the last modified date off all affected files, forcing Roon to rescan only those files whilst ensuring they don’t show up as new albums given I use modified date as import date
I do tag editing from my desktop and NFS mounts don’t munge file paths and file names like SMB does across platforms
I have scripts that leverage scp to copy newly tagged music to the server and then move them to a backup drive.
I periodically test flac file integrity using tools best run locally rather than across a network
Lovely!
But you could do all of this on your backupfiles locally and then RSYNC them back to the ROCK-can? I assume you have a backup on a portable drive!
Not being confrontational, I’m curious, is it just music files? And how big? I have a nice 10tb USB drive that I use for backing up my archive of various digital content. You can get RAID USB “drives” but that kind of stretches the definition of portable.
Of course, I don’t see the requirement that a backup system be portable.
Like I say, no offense intended. You clearly know a thing or three about computers, and you got to do what makes sense to you
I use 2x10TB drives for backup using rsync. I’ll never again out my data in the hands of a proprietary raid system. When I use raid I use mdadm, but with today’s drive sizes I think raid is ill-advised.
There’s no portable drive in the world big enough to hold my backup.