Hey - I have an old Yoga 13, with a 1 TB SSD + OS SSD, and 8gb ram, 3rd Gen i5 -
It was one of the first in the Yoga line and I’m wondering if I could retire it to use it as a Roon core…
Is it powerful enough to leave on forever in the basement hooked up to my LAN via Wi-Fi or USB Ethernet, or am I going to need something with a bit more oomph?
My main Hi-Fi uses the Pro-Ject Stream Box Ultra s2, so this would feed it with all of my shared music from throughout the network there, plus phones, tablets, etc.
Shares come from various computers, wifi router attached external shares, usb, and two Drobo NAS units. However, I’d have at least 6TB of just music that’d be always on, plus more as computers or externals power on, etc.
Technically it would work but is far from ideal for the job IMHO.
While such devices are designed to save as much energy as possible, greatly reducing speeds and may even turn of internal devices/subsystems completely because of their limited capacity to dissipate heat (and usually get very noisy if this is not possible), Roon as a server software on the other hand expects all relevant internal devices/subsystem to be present and available with full speed at any time. You can expect all sorts of problems using Roon if you’re unable to disable all necessary power-saving options, but by doing so you will put more stress on the cooling system. As the device is already older, the cooling system (fan) might die at any time – leading to extreme loss of speed, safety shutdown or the system might just die.
Also 6TB of data spread over various devices/shares isn’t easy to monitor. Because of the usually much higher speed and reliability of wired Ethernet over WiFi I wouldn’t try to connect the Roon Core via WiFi.
Thanks, that makes I can see how the laptop could lead to issues here, plus I’d have to add ethernet since these laptops dropped ethernet.
Sounds like I’ll probably go with a ThinkCentre M90n mini desktop or a M93p on refurb then, and run a Win 10 Pro / Roon Core. That’ll be a little more power, but not bad overall for a machine that size moved into a spare room where I can cable in ethernet and not have to hear it. I may be able to repurpose the always on machine then to manage a few spare tasks as well. I debated trying a new M90n Nano IoT fanless… but overkill on cost, and only an i3 - the i5 4570 of the M93p should be fine.