Which synology nas is the best for roon and which is the least expensive?
The most powerful Synology is the best for Roon, and the least powerful is the least expensive.
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Hi @Erik_Smith and welcome to the forum.
If Roon is the only reason for you to buy a NAS, don’t do it. Use a supported NUC and run ROCK on it – you get more for your money. If you have good reasons to buy a NAS and just want to run Roon on it too, because it already is an always on PC in your network (Why add another one just for Roon?), then you should probably name them if you’re expecting reasonable recommendations.
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The S in NAS stands for storage, not for server, and that’s what any NAS is basically made for: storage and related tasks (back-ups, replications and so on), and that’s what they do best. Anything else you put on it will always run at the edge of the performance (or underperformance to be more realistic) because basically they are just computers with modest specifications. Most of the users here will recommend a NUC as the best balance between cost and performance, and that’s for a good reason. Roon also recommends the NUC platform.
That being said I have personally used a DS720+ (set with 2x250GB RAID0 SSD disks, 8GB Memory and 256GB M.2 cache) exclusively as server machine for ROON (and Plex for that matter), with the media stored on another NAS. For my use case (no DSP, no transcoding, just native, direct play in both roon and plex, only one endpoint at the time, and only one user at the time) it was acceptable, with no serios issues others than occasionally bumps mostly related to roon’s responsiveness. But for me was just an experiment, once returned to a real server machine (i7) the difference was obvious.
If you have the money, or as @BlackJack said, you need the NAS for something else too, you can try it for your self, nothing here will be as valuable for you as your own experience.
I have a Synology DS220+ with two 2TB Seagate ST2000NM001A Exos 7E8 hard drives in Synology’s hybrid RAID configuration, for a total storage space of 2TB, but with redundancy. The drives have 2M hours MTBF! I looked at many different hard drives from different manufacturers. These hard drives spin at 7,200 rpm and have a high transfer rate and low latency. When I queried Seagate about using an SSD for this application they said they didn’t recommend it. They’ve been doing this a long time and so took their advice. The nice thing about having a separate NAS is that you can then use it for other needs in the future as well. This is not an inexpensive option, but I think it’s a pretty solid setup with very good performance. It’s being accessed with a Roon Nucleus for playing the music and a MacBook Pro to add, modify, and remove music files. I’ve been very happy with this setup, other than the frequently encountered Roon software bugs, but that’s a whole 'nuther chapter in software development and maintenance…
I’d agree there are better options for your Roon core than a NAS, at least one that doesn’t cost a fortune (NUC, Mac mini to name but two). I would say a DS218 play would be fine (relatively inexpensive) for storing your files, or a DS220+ if you want a bit more grunt. I have a DS214play which has been going strong for 7 years. I use Western Digital WD Red Pro 7200rpm NAS hard drives, available different capacities.
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I have that exact NAS, the DS214play. serves up my files using NFS and just chugs along. I have a little NUC 5i5 I picked up that works as the “core”
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Great little box, as you say just keeps chugging away. Preemptively replaced one of the drives a couple of months ago as it popped a few bad sectors.
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A lot will depend on the specs of the NAS and how big your library is. for the most part I too would steer clear of a NAS and look for a macmini or NUC to run a Roon Server install or ROCK respectively.
You can get a single bay Synology NAS which will be cheaper, but you’re obviously losing out on the resiliency. I use the below in my home network with Roon (and also for storage for Plex), running with a 4TB HDD.
I run a weekly backup to an external HDD through my laptop (FreeFileSync makes this super simple) so I don’t lose everything if the disk dies, but touch wood it’s been going for a few years with no issues.
Like others have said, I wouldn’t recommend running Roon Core off a NAS (the one I’ve linked almost certainly couldn’t handle it) and just get a refurbed NUC from eBay
As previously mentioned here. Buy a supported NUC (used one that is some years old works fine), and install ROCK on it. If you want an even better experience, install a local SSD for music on the NUC.