I have a Roon Nucleus+ purchased in 2019; I believe it is a first-generation model, though I am not entirely certain. I would like to upgrade the system SSD as well as the RAM.
Initially, the following SSD products were recommended to me:
Kingston KC3000 512GB M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe 4.0
Samsung 990 Pro 1TB NVMe M.2
WD_BLACK SN850X 2TB NVMe M.2 2280
Another set of recommendations I received were the Samsung 970 EVO Plus or the WD Blue SN570, as they reportedly run cooler—a vital factor in a fanless chassis like the Nucleus.
For the memory upgrade, the recommendation is to use two sticks of Crucial 16GB DDR4 2666 MT/s (PC4-21300) 260-pin SODIMM.
Could anyone who has performed these upgrades share their experience regarding the difference in performance? Are these specific products highly recommended for this unit?
I have a similar Nucleus+, the original model. I upgraded the SSD and RAM a while back to:
Samsung 980 Pro
Kingston Fury 2x16GB DDR4
I was experiencing performance issues, e.g. general sluggishness in navigation. These upgrades made zero improvement on performance. I think my performance issues have more to do with the content of my library since it has very large numbers of unidentified albums by a small number of artists. Performance is decent after a reboot and then declines rapidly after a few hours.
I found out later that the 980 Pro (and the 990 Pro) offer zero benefit vs the 970 EVO in a Nucleus+ since although the 980/990 Pro are PCIe 4.0 drives, they will be limited to PCIe3.0 speeds due to the Intel NUC architecture.
You could always get an SSD heatsink, it’s 10 or 20€ and it does drop the temperatures, depending on the model. But, from what I’ve seen when I bought one for my main PC, it won’t matter much if at all for Roon use. The temperatures will go up with stuff that is constantly reading and writing on your SSD, just fetching music files doesn’t come close to it.
Anyway, I got a Thermalright M.2 2280 TYPE A B, if you care to look into tests. Dropped about 10ºC in highly intensive benchmarks that push the SSD to the max. Its also low profile enough but check if it fits a nucleus.
Generally it’s only worth adding memory to a Nucleus / ROCK if you’re exceeding what they have (in which case they crash) as unlike most machines they don’t swap.
Similarly you’re unlikely to see a material improvement from a faster SSD, if the current one is working correctly.
If you can highlight your library size etc, and what is running slowly, one of the guys here may have some suggestions.
Hi there! Thank you so much for the comment and the technical insights. That makes a lot of sense.
To give you some context regarding my library size: my local storage is actually very small. I use an external SSD that holds a maximum of 120 albums. The vast majority of my collection is cloud-based, with about 5,400 albums added to my Roon library.
The sluggishness I’m experiencing (which is my main issue) happens mostly when I’m quickly browsing through discographies and searching for specific albums.
The interesting detail that made me suspect a memory issue is this: whenever I restart the Nucleus software and clear the cache, the performance improves considerably. The UI becomes snappy and fluid again. However, after just a few hours of use, the system goes right back to the exact same sluggish state.
Given that clearing the cache and restarting temporarily fixes the issue, do you think this could be a symptom of a memory leak in how the Nucleus handles cloud metadata caching over time? Any suggestions on what to look into next would be greatly appreciated!
Hi there! Thank you so much for sharing your upgrade experience. Your insight regarding the PCIe 3.0 bottleneck on the Nucleus+ motherboard was a golden tip — because of it, I decided against spending extra on a Samsung 990 Pro and opted for an SSD focused on thermal stability and lower latency (like the Kingston NV3 / WD Blue), knowing the raw speed would be capped by the Intel NUC architecture anyway.
What really caught my attention in your post were the symptoms, as I am facing the exact same issue, but with a very different library setup.
My local storage is tiny: I use an external SSD holding a maximum of 120 albums. The vast bulk of my collection is cloud-based, totaling around 5,400 albums. Unlike your scenario, I’m quite methodical with organization and have no “unidentified” albums in my database, which theoretically shouldn’t force the processor into an endless background metadata search.
Even so, general navigation through discographies eventually crawls to a halt. The curious thing is that, just like in your case, if I restart the Nucleus software and clear the cache, the performance becomes fantastic and snappy again. The issue is that the sluggishness inevitably returns after a few hours of continuous use.
Your post makes me even more convinced that the real bottleneck we are facing isn’t the SSD speed, but rather how the operating system (Roon OS) manages memory leaks and cloud caching over time. Thanks a lot for the write-up!
That’s my conclusion. Roon definitely has a memory leak issue that has gotten better/worse over the years. There may be other issues at play as well, e.g. how it handles unidentified content, and how it interacts with its web services. There is no hardware upgrade that’s going to fix that. Hopefully the upcoming release on April 27th will help.
I completely agree with your assessment regarding the memory leak and the interaction with web services. Since the vast majority of my library is cloud-based, I feel that weight on the cache directly.
However, I’ve decided to go ahead with a 32GB RAM (Dual Channel) upgrade and a cooler-running SSD for the OS anyway. I know perfectly well that throwing hardware at a software memory leak doesn’t fix the code, but I believe this massive RAM headroom will give me a much larger “bucket” to hold the leak before the system bogs down. Plus, the Dual Channel should physically speed up the cover art rendering on the UI. Let’s hope together that the April 27 update brings some real under-the-hood optimizations to fix the root cause!