NUC ROCK compatibility and over heat issue if used with 100K tracks?

Roon Core Machine

Intel NUC 10i7fnh (6 core CPU)
Crucial 16GB DDR4 2666 x2
Crucial 2.5” 250GB MX500 SSD
AData xpg sx8200 pro 2TB m2 NVMe

Networking Gear & Setup Details

Connected Audio Devices

Number of Tracks in Library

Description of Issue

May I know with the above spec for my NUC will be good enough to store 100k albums tracks and will it cause overheating issue in the long run?

[Moderator Edit: Updated “albums” to “tracks”.]

You seem to have the capacities of your two discs the wrong way round.

I would have the capacity of the m.2 SSD set at 250GB, and the 2.5" drive set at 2TB.

The m.2 SSD is used for the Roon operating system, the Roon application (Core and Output components) and the Roon database.

The 2.5" drive will be used for local storage of your music.

Just noticed that you intend to store 100k albums - so that’s a big library. If these are locally-stored albums, you’re going to need more than 2TB of storage. I have 1,300 local albums, and have used 40% of my 2TB disc to store them…

I suspect that your spec is underpowered on all fronts for a library that size.

Hi Geoff,

It does not matter if the song is stored in a slower storage? Roon OS in faster storage will do?
Maybe about 5-10k albums?
What about the heat? will it be over heat if i on 24/7 (idle =12-16h / playing 6-12h)?

Music storage does not require SSD speed - the Roon database definitely does.

ROCK For Large Libraries (12k+ albums) or DSP Use

We recommend the NUC10i7FNH with 8GB RAM and 128GB (or more) M.2 SSD for large libraries (12k+ albums) or heavy DSP use.

100K+ albums sounds like a job for a high-performance server

1 Like

If my library was pushing 1 million tracks or more, than, I would invest in a desktop CPU with 32 GB of RAM, several large internal HD drives, and run Linux or Windows.

If you are still planning on wanting to run a NUC, you should go for 32 GB of RAM with a database that large. In terms of storage, an external USB HDD is already faster than is required for music playback.

Wouldn’t the initial scan take a very long time if via a presumably USB interface from an external hard drive? My 27k albums mix of CD quality and high Rez took quite a while on internal hard drives on dual Xeon 16 core CPUs with 128GB RAM

I have a feeling that the NUC might perform ok. And I agree with maxing out the RAM to 32GB for a library that size.

External USB might still be way faster than NAS. And yes, importing library of that size may take saya and the analising parts might take weeks. It is the background analysing part that might make the NUC overheat because it would take weeks to analyze that many tracks. I suggest to put the background analysing speed to throttled and On-Demand analysing to Fast so it won’t overheat the NUC for weeks. But it would take maybe monthly for the background analysing to finish.

If NUC is still desired, and he has a free desktop system, he could import and analyse everything using a desktop PC and do all the heavy works on that. Once everything is done, do a database backup and restore the database to the NUC. At this point, I the NUC might be just fine.

SSD speeds are not needed for storage drives. The hard drive will not be a bottleneck in playback. They’re nice to have when copying files to the drive and when doing track analysis.

Not sure how ROCK allocates ram, but I’m running Roon Server (100k+ tracks,local), HQPlayer and using ZFS which takes ~50% RAM for the ARC cache. And as seen below I sometimes use a little swap. There were some initial hiccups but I’ve gotten this machine very stable now.

So on a machine dedicated to just RoonServer, I think 32GB is more the sufficient.

Hard drive wise, the boot SSD is 256GB, currently 20.7GB is used for Ubuntu and RoonServer. And that’s with 100k+ local tracks in the server library (not the audio storage).

I guess what I’m trying to say is, even with a lot of tracks, my RoonServer library is under 20GB.

The storage drive usually show small blips every so often for transfer, but not sure how accurate the reading would be as it’s showing ZFS pool iostats and probably just storing data in the ARC RAM cache.

Do you mean 100k Albums or 100k Tracks, if albums you must be in the top 10 biggest Roon libraries !!

Assume even at 44.1/16 3000 albums per Tb = 33Tb not allowing any Hi Res

ROCK is probably OK but the server would need to a beast 16 Gb unlikely to cut it . I would go Windows with at least 32 Gb RAM maybe even 64 Gb. Then add a load of 4Tb HDD

Sorry @Rugby just said that , I reinforce.

The NUC will go up to 64 Gb (at least my 10i7 will)

I meant 100k tracks =X, just wanna know Tidal / Qobuz songs added to playlist does it impact on the space required?

Right, so you mean 100k tracks, not 100k albums - that’s a relief! So then your original spec for a ROCK/NUC system is fine - with the proviso that the m.2 SSD should be 250GB and the 2.5" drive
should be 2TB.

Tidal or Qobuz tracks/albums that are added to your library will also be accounted for in the database.

1 Like

Tidal or Qobuz tracks/albums that are added to your library will also be accounted for in the database.

Accounted for storage space in the roon OS where i install? or accounted for the storage music drive.

In the database - which is on the m.2 SSD. Streamed files are not stored locally in music storage.

100k tracks would be fine with i3 and 8GB and for 100k tracks ignore my previous suggestions. I have double the number of tracks you have and used to use NUC8i3 with 8GB and it was fine. I upgraded to NUC8i5 with 16GB when I repurposed the NUC8i3.

I just had visions of a Data Centre to hold your collection :joy:

It’s been said above …

I recently converted to NUC/ROCK , a 10i7 , 256 M.2 SSD, 4Tb SSD

I added 32 gb RAM because I could , my library is around 130k , but a lot of classical so track size can be high

nice… but having higher spec hoping it to be instant and not over working

Not sure where you are getting the connection between running hot and number of tracks from. I have a 5 year old 7i7 NUC with 16GB Ram with 150k tracks. Most storage is external on two USB drives. The NUC has never run anything hotter than ‘warm to the touch’ with the fan barely running. I only use a bit of DSP (PEQ) on one endpoint and there is never more than two endpoints being driven at any one time (six in total for the house).

No doubt if I used convolution (planned) regularly or a lot of DSP on multiple active endpoints then the heat situation may change but at the moment it is clearly just ticking over thermally. Keeping the NUC ventilation slot and fan clean from dust is important if your ROCK is in the living room (mine is in the garage, so largely dust free).