As a result of this I’m considering upgrading to a Titan.
Two questions, please, if I may - for anyone with experience of both:
would the (in my case 4TB) internal SSD tray that I currently have in my (faulty?) Rev B Nucleus work directly with a Titan… it’s nowhere near full and I could ‘park’ 4TB in a Titan until I needed to increase it the Titan’s capacity?
one thing I know is that I would need (for possible future diagnosis/troubleshooting) is a monitor connected to it via HDMI; any particular model anyone can kindly recommend, please; aren’t all male-to-male HDMI cables the same? If not, which? I’ve been looking here. Especially something cheap like this one.
Ii don’t know if the SSD tray from the Nucleus Plus will fit into the Titan. I doubt it. However the SSD itself will most certaly fit in the Titan and the Titan will recognise it as a Roon formatted internal drive so there should be bo need to re-copy your music to it.
As regards a monitor for your Titan, any computer monitor or TV is good enough provided it has a full size HDMI port. These days, your choice is as likely to be made on the basis of aesthetics as anything else and we can advise on that.
No Nucleus device requires anything other than the most basic monitor. The questions you should be asking yourself are:
is the monitor going to be used for anything else?
is the monitor going to be permenantly connected and powered on?
Personally, I cannot see the point in a permenantly connected monitor (the Nucleus display is not pretty and, when everything is working, it is not even particularly useful).
As a consequence, unless the monitor was going to serve some other purpose as well, I would opt for a small, 1080P monitor that can be disconnected and stored away somewhere without taking up too much room.
Thank you very much, Wade. That’s extraordinarily helpful and much appreciated.
As far as you know, does the Titan come with a choice of internal storage SSD‘s; if not, is there a particular brand – for example, Samsung – which I could use in a Titan if I don’t unscrew my Nucles rev B SSD, and install that? The most important criterion to me is reliability and durability.
I looked at some very cheap monitors on Amazon, for example, those sold to go with the Raspberry Pi In the region of under $40, I don’t think the links made it in my original post. Would something like that work?
It would be dedicated it could be cheap and I would only use it if I ever had to run diagnostics on my Nucleus.
As far as I’m aware, the Titan does not come with any storage drive.
If you want to buy a new storage SSD to fit in the Titan (it will take 2.5in SATA HDDs as well but why would you put as mechanical HDD into a silent device that is designed to be on display), the Samsung 2.5in form factor SSD’s are well respected.
For this purpose, I would recommend the Samsung 870 QVO drives. They come in 250GB, 500GB, 1, 2, 4 and 8TB capacities although the 4 and 8TB devices start getting very expensive (~$300 and $600 respectively).
The alternative in the Samsung range is the EVO range. These are more reliable in applications where there is a lot more repeated write operations but offer no advantage over the QVO drives for use as a Nucleus storage drive where, typically, files will be written once and thereafter only read.
So I’d ‘only’ be increasing the cost of a new Titan from $3,999 to $4,599 for 8 TB?
That seems like a good deal .
The slight conundrum I have is that after my Rev B has gone back (for trade-in, repair) I’d have no way to transfer the contents of my Rev B’s storage (Roon db and FLAC files) onto a new Titan - because there is only one storage slot.
Would a clone using Carbon Copy Cloner via SMB (which is how I make backups of my Roon data now) work just as well, be just as reliable, please?
Only if you can see yourself using 8TB for local library storage.
If you are currently using 2TB, then 4TB gives you a 100% margin - there does not seem much point in paying for an 8TB SSD with a 300% capacity margin.
Unless you have a copy of the contents of the Nucleus Plus storage SSD somewhere else, copying the contents of the N+ SSD to a new Titan internal storage SSD will not be as easy you would hope as a Windows user because Windows machines cannot read the SSD formatted internally in the Nucleus.
The only fault with this plan is that, depending upon the nature of the fault with the Nucleus Plus, it is possible that the storage SSD has been damaged (unlikely). In this case, you will only find out when you fit the SSD in the Titan. Thus, planning to use this SSD could cost you a few extra days without a local library whilst you wait for a new SSD to arrive.
That is possible. I have a large (several thousand) CD collection built up since the 1980s. Eventually I’d like to have them all ripped and in Roon.
Fortunately I do - a couple of good clones.
I’m actually running only macOS 15 (Sequoia), which does (did!) allow me to see the contents of my Nucleus Rev B (presumably not too different from +) via SAMBA.
Indeed. That has occurred to me. I’m counting on its being very unlikely since nothing I can do will get the Rev B to power up at all.
It’s complex, isn’t it. But thanks to all this input it’s all becoming clearer !
I think you should be “honest with the mirror” about the rate of growth of your library. How long did it take you to need a 4TB drive? DO you plan on acquiring significantly more music? If so, then upgrading to an 8TB would be the play.
Personally, I find that transferring from the SMB backup share on my Synology to the new drive in the Titan was the easiest route for me.
Watch Best Buy for Geek Squad Certified Refurbished Samsung 870 QVO SATA SSD availability. They come up for sale only periodically, and most are never initialized returns from customers who could not figure out how to install and format them. In other words, they are still SMART 100 percent health brand new but open box, usually at around a 50 percent discount. I recently got a QVO 4 TB for around $150.
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