Hello. I have a library with 460,000 tracks and about 16tb. It will keep growing. I am presently running roon on an i7 6th generation windows pc with 32 gb of memory. I am getting a lot of hiccups and large pausing. I would like to upgrade the hardware to eliminate these problems. I am thinking of getting:
Intel NUC 11 Pro NUC11PAHi7 Home & Business Desktop Mini PC，Intel Core i7-1165G7 4-Core, 2.8–4.7 GHz Turbo，8 Thread, 12MB Cache, 32GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB PCIe SSD, 28W Intel Iris Xe Graphics, Win 10 Pro
Is this my best option? Please let me know if there is a better option.
For large libraries, the most important things are the size of the RAM and the speed of the disk. Your upgrade doesn’t seem to increase RAM, and you’re not saying what disk you currently have. If the disk is slow, you should upgrade that first and see if it makes a difference.
Can you recommend a disk? My present pc has an 250gb ssd but it’s the one that came with the pc. It’s a regular 2.5 inch drive. Can fit anything else. The pc has a 6th generation processor so not the best.
On Windows, you can find details of your system in the “System Information” app. To see what disk you currently have, go to Storage>Disks in the left panel. This is one of mine:
If your motherboard supports it, I’d go for an M.2; those are generally faster than the 2.5" drives. You can see what motherboard and CPU you have on “System Summary” in the same app. These are mine:
The OP would probably be better off running ROCK and avoiding all the baggage that comes with Windows.
Therefore, at least until ROCK is updated, any NUC below a GEN11.
@Ayax_Conde, if you do run ROCK you don’t need an M.2 greater than 512GB, if that. Most ROCK installs don’t need anything greater than 128GB, but they don’t have the collection you do.
Where do you keep your music files? Probably a NAS? I would put the music on a USB drive (or two or three) and use the NAS strictly as backup.
I don’t know what baggage that is (I don’t remember seeing any examples), but having a general purpose OS not only lets you use whatever hardware you want, it doesn’t have any of the limitations of a locked down system. You can rip your CDs with it, for example, the proper way.
The baggage, as far as running Roon goes, is well known and has been discussed on this forum many times.
OK, I’ll humor you. Here’s four, 1) frequent Window’s updates that have resulted in breaking Roon, 2) inadvertent changing of firewall exceptions that result in breaking Roon, 3) video driver problems when using Window’s drivers, 4) the overhead of background processes that have nothing to do with running a music app.
My unstanding is that my original nuc specs are for amobile processor and that I would be better off using a regular desktop because of the size of my library. Any suggestions?
When ROCK needs to be updated, I’m sure Roon would that. Until then, leave well enough alone.
That may be, but that hasn’t been the case for other people, and who needs the hassle.
Your objection is irrelevant. People who want to install Roon on a Windows PC probably aren’t running headless. That’s just your presumption, but you knew that.
That’s true, but ROCK uses the Roon OS, which is designed to use the minimum background processes. That is, in part, one of its stated objectives
I manage a million FLAC tracks on a Chinese i9 MiniPC with 48GB RAM and Windows 10, and HQPlayer 4, optimised with Fidelizer Pro. Search the forum for “Mock”. It works fine.
I don’t understand the need for massive amounts of memory. Guess I’m looking for advise. I use an i9, dedicated windows 10, computer with 16gb of memory. I have 500,00 plus tracks and never see memory usage above 35%. Should I buy more memory and why? Thanks!
If you want to serve, and I mean properly serve, then ditch windows. If you install something decent on that machine and use it just for that you wont have any issues.
Something like unraid, or OpenMediaVault will run on that hardware and present services to the rest of the LAN properly.
I have nothing against windows, its my preferred OS, but when it comes to running servers its just not very good. Amongst other things, its using a terrific amount of resources of the processor just to run windows, and if nothing else the constant updates and restarts make it acting as a server not great.
Somewhere jere I saw that for mega collections Windows was the preferred OS
I used a i7 7700 16 gb RAM. 256 SSD woth media on HDD . My library is 150k though but classical hence low file count . High Gb
Maybe a more modern i7 or i9 and lotsa RAM . The system SSD you probably cant find less than 256. But you will never fill it on a stand alone Roon install mine is <10% full
I ran Windows for 5 years no blips . I recently went NUC 10i7 wth 256 gb SSD 32 gb RAM , Runs great but much less tracks
Fidelizer Pro ensures that only the necessary processes in Windows are run with the right priority. I was surprised how much this app was able to improve the sound.
