I used to have all my music stored on my Macbook Pro 2015 (200 albums) but over the last 12 months my library has increased to 500 albums.
I recently bought a new M2 MacBook Air and a Synology DS224+ NAS. I have all my music stored on the NAS.
I have an old Intel NUC lying about with windows 11 so i decided to install my Roon Core on the NUC and direct it to my NAS music folder. I am running the NUC headless and it stays on at all times. I control Roon via my Macbook Air, iPhone or Samsung Tablet in the house.
With the hardware i have just mentioned can anyone think of a better way to set up my Roon Core or is the best set up for what i have?
I read that you can install Roon Core directly onto the Synology but i’m unsure how performance would be in comparison to the NUC.
If you’ve installed Roon Core on Windows on the NUC, then an alternative could be to install ROCK on the NUC. Provided that your NUC meets the system requirements in terms of memory and an SSD to store the Roon database.
The NAS itself could be somewhat underpowered to run Roon. Especially in its default configuration where it only has 2GB of RAM. And ideally you would need an SSD on which to run the Roon database.
Before going down the ROCK route, make sure to check that your NUC is on the NUC compatibility list towards the end of the article linked by @SvenM above.
If it is not, it may still work but there are no guarantees (and no support from ROON) and if it does not work, then you will not know until after Windows has been obliterated. Thus, if you attempt to install ROCK and it does not work, then you will have to re-install Windows from scratch.
Personally, I would not bother if Roon Server on Windows headless is working for you.
You can relatively easily upgrade the RAM on the NAS and install ROON. Data and ROON on one device has advantages.
I had this constellation with this NAS for a long time > 3500 albums, multiroom, DSD, parametric EQ and upsampling at some end points without any problems.