QNAP SSD for Roon - dedicated SSD or does SSD Caching work just as well?

Roon Software QNAP/Synology NAS
#1

Hi all, Happy New Year (almost)… I finally got my M2 PCIe SSD Card sorted for the QNAP (TS-871 i7). I have 1 x Samsung MZ-V7E250BW 970 EVO 250 GB NVMe M.2 Internal SSD in place, dedicated for Roon. It works and flies, very happy.

Question however, if this was set up as the QNAP SSD Cache Acceleration would it work just as well?

I rarely use my NAS for anything other than backing up some data (infrequent and overnight) and running Roon (App on SSD and 12TB of music on the HDD’s) - so in theory, as the Cache Acceleration keeps the most frequently used things on the SSD’s, if that’s mainly Roon would that possibly work better and also improve overall performance?

Secondly, if I bought another 250GB M2 SSD and set up both SSD’s as Cache Acceleration (RAID 1) - would the Roon server work just as well, or should it always be on dedicated (or dedicated RAID1)?

Option 3 I guess is to get a second SSD and set that up as Cache Acceleration while keeping the first SSD dedicated for Roon app and DB. Advantage is still fast, disadvantage is no RAID on either Roon SSD or Cache Acceleration so if one SSD fails I lose the data.

Final question, I assume that as with other QNAP RAID stuff, if I put in two different size SSD’s and set as RAID 1, I only get the advantage of the smallest if set up RAID?? Boy I miss my DROBO with BeyondRaid!!

I assume if I go with option 3 (Roon app on dedicated 250GB SSD and Cache Acceleration dedicated on 2nd SSD), I can choose a bigger SSD for Cache Acceleration and use it all, as not linked to the Roon SSD.

Hopefully this makes sense!

Thanks!

2 Likes
#2

Hello, I have the same NAS TS-871UP i7 as you. I did try this cache acceleration with two 1tb Nvme in raid 1 config. I found absolutely no difference in Roon performance. I have a large 8tb music library. I believe cache acceleration work best when say you are editing large files eg;4k videos. So when reading a small music file it doesn’t help much at all.

If you setup the two drives as cache acceleration I don’t believe you can set it up as a normal drive to load files such as Roon or anything else.

Correct two different drive sizes in raid config you end up with smallest drive size as the basis.

#3

Perfect - thanks for clarifying