This is purely informational in hopes it will help someone else.
I upgraded the RAM from the 4GB that the unit comes with to the 32GB max RAM supported. I used the RAM recommended by Roon and it’s made a huge difference.
A lot of disassembly to get to the RAM slot and you have to be very, very careful of the flimsy ribbon SATA cable they included with the unit (why or why didn’t they just use a standard SATA cable since I have a hundred lying around).
When you remove the hard drive panel be careful of this ribbon cable as it can literally just slip out and they’ll charge you $25 for the pleasure of another stating that it’s not a covered item.
Anyhow the performance is much, much improved thus far with multiple zones (four total) playing difference songs and having decent sized cues at once with a 120k song library.
I did have to reinstall ROCK via USB as it seemed to be stuck post upgrade. I’d have preferred to pay more for the device out of the gate and not had to deal with all the nonsense.
Hopefully this helps someone whose Nucleus One was having trouble with constant freezing, lockups, etc.
Sure would be nice to have these manufacturers deliver more. The spread between the Nucleus One @ $500 and the high end Nucleus Titan @ $4,000 is a bit ridiculous. Hope the Titan has better internals at that price point.
This sounds like you have manually installed ROCK on a Nucleus One, if this is the case it will lead to issues as RoonOS that is supplied as part of ROCK does not contain the thermal management control that the original Nucleus RoonOS supports.
I recommend creating a Roon support ticket (there’s an option for this scenario) to get that resolved ASAP before any damage to the hardware takes place.
If i’m not misinformed, the Nucleus One do have a fan still? Does it need management software for temperature control? Other things, probably, but they are likely less critical.
If you have the skills to dismantle an atomic bomb…
I’m saying, there are many options to running Roon, one does not NEED to go Nucleus, particularly if you are confident enough to upgrade RAM on a NUC based device.
ROCK concept covers many possible scenarios, whereas your choice of a One is expecting a bit much from a Celeron based NUC (however nice it is!).
I looked around for the software to reinstall from a USB for Nucleus One and there didn’t seem to be any on offer. Luckily I haven’t utilized it much aside from initial testing as I’ve been on vacation. Is there a link to the software for Nucleus One online or is support the only option? Let me know. Thanks
I liked the looks of it. They matched well with my system. If I had it to do over at this point I probably would however the RAM upgrade seems to have eliminated any lag so I don’t think the Celeron was the main bottleneck. I also wanted to give some support to Roon.
I’m curious. What circumstances suggest it is time to upgrade RAM? Would it be the number of music albums, or the number of tracks? If so what number would suggest that it’s time to upgrade RAM? For example I have 1600 albums.
Roon OS does not work slower if it’s out of RAM. The symptom of being out of RAM on Roon OS are crashes. If it doesn’t crash, more RAM does not make it faster or have any other effect.
I can dig out the many posts by Roon’s Danny confirming this, but I’d rather you search yourself or believe me
Edit: I did it anyway. See the links at the bottom*.
Albums consist of tracks and it’s the latter count that really matters.
Pop/rock albums contain ~13 tracks on average, so with 1,600 albums you might have 20,000 tracks.
A Nucleus or Nucleus One with default RAM is rated for 100,000 tracks.
I had the original Nucleus with a large library on an internal SSD, but its performance was dismal, so I upgraded to the maximum of 32GB. Frankly, I noticed no difference. After years of frustration, I sold it for a song and bought a low-end iMac, placing the SSD in an external USB enclosure. The difference was night and day; I wish I had done it years earlier.
I don’t understand why Roon charges so much for a low-end machine with a fancy case, especially when increasing processing power costs almost nothing. Common sense told me the most reliable option would be to buy directly from the source, but that wasn’t the case.
I assume most of us use a separate streamer and wouldn’t be bothered by processing power affecting a server’s sound quality. I think much of that is superstition anyway.
It’s not the machine that’s at fault. Something in the compilation/build/architecture of RoonOS totally fecks these machines up. I left RoonOS for Win11 and got a huge performance increase on my Nucleus+…
