Could someone please help a newbie
Will this machine work ok as Roon server ?
Intel NUC NUC7i5BNK, Intel i5-7260U CPU, 8GB DDR4 RAM, 500GB SSD
Don’t want to make a bad purchase, Thanks
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Perfect choice. Depending on library size, dsp, upsampling, zones caveats.
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Ged, you were quicker 
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You didn’t say how big your library is or whether you plan to do any heavy duty DSP.
The short answer is that any i5 is GTG. Gen7 is one of the best, performance wise, to run Roon.
If all you want it for is to run Roon, then load ROCK on it.
If you are going to run ROCK, then a 500Gb SSD for the OS is overkill as you can only put ROCK on it, i.e. no music files. Even 128Gb is too big, but 64Gb SSDs are hard to find.
Thanks everyone
Have about 1tb of high res music
Can I not put music on the SSD , just the OS ?
That model looks like it only supports one drive.
What OS are you going to use?
If you are going to run ROCK you can only put the OS on the drive.
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The BNK models are the smaller height NUCs - it’s the BNH model you want if you want to be able to have an internal 2.5" drive (SSD or HDD) to hold music files. As @bearFNF says, if you use ROCK on the M.2 SSD, then you can’t put music files on this drive. If you use Windows or Linux, then you can store music files on the SSD.
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What is that in Number of Tracks?
You can always use an external USB Drive to hold the music. They work very well.
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Dont get hung up on it only having one drive. Usb drives work exceptionally well for music store on Rock. Its what I use also makes it more portable to move to another machine as and if needed.
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As @CrystalGipsy says…don’t sweat the internal drive.
Going external gives you tons of options.
I use one 8tb HDD and two 4tb HDD external drives.
No problems at all.
I use an external drive too. I put an ssd in an external case and it works really well.
If you use ROCK, the music cannot be placed on the OS drive. You’ll have to use an external drive because there is no space for an internal 2.5" drive in this NUC model.
If you use Windows, you can share the music with the OS drive, but you’ll also need more RAM than 8GB.
It would be relatively trivial to obtain a smaller M.2 for the OS and move the 500gb one to an external caddy. All depending on experience and confidence of course. But 1tb of decent quality external storage would be cheap enough to get two in the event of failure or to factor in growth.
Hello Jon, Welcome to the community.
I’d go for the taller version of the NUC, if possible, to ovoid future updates, with at least 4TB SATA SSD inside in addition to the M.2 for OS and Database, and max out the ram while your at it (32GB kit with 2 16GB matched sticks is inexpensive). Only USB attachment would be an external SSD for backups. Small compact music server package. Running ROCK will eliminate the possibility of issues with Windows updates.
I started out with 16GB ram and 1TB SSD for my library. That was fine in the beginning for my small 300 CD collection but I quickly used up the space when I stated purchasing/downloading music files. MC DSD files are huge (25GB) if you get into that. Never had any issue with 16GB ram but decided to max it out while the box was open to replaced the 1TB SSD with a 4TB.
Good luck with your choices and enjoy the music…
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