Rebuilding my music library from Sooloos to ROCK

Roon Software Discussion
1

Before rebuilding my music library, I have a few questions for the group:

Current equipment setup: T+A Power Plant Balanced, Music Player Balanced (not Roon Ready), Elac Varro RS500 Sub, Cabasse Baltic 5, Orange power conditioner

My current streamer: Meridian Media Core 200 (with Sooloos), limited to 2 TB hard drives. I have four such drives, which need to be swapped out as needed. Currently, there are about 5,000 to 6,000 CDs on each drive. I want to consolidate these when I switch to Roon Rock. This will result in a total of at least 20,000 CDs that Roon Rock will manage. A small portion are MP3s, but the majority are FLACs, WAVs, and PCMs. Sooloos has previously reduced the file size of music files to be streamed during import. In the new system, most CDs will be in high resolution. The hard drive will have a capacity of at least 20 TB.

  1. How should the data be transferred to the Roon Rock Core? Should everything be copied to the large hard drive beforehand and then read? Or is it better to transfer it gradually over the LAN while the system is running?
  2. Will the planned system be able to manage this large number of CDs, or should the CDs be distributed across two 10 TB drives?
  3. Can the hard drives be connected in parallel, or is it better to connect them individually?
  4. Will Roon Rock recognize the CDs after reading and swapping drives, or will it always have to be reread each time, which is a lengthy process?

The plan is to switch to a NUC 8 Gigabyte Brix GB-BRI5H with a quad-core i5, 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4 RAM, and a 256 GB SSD as the Roon Rock Core. The large hard drive(s) would then be connected to the USB 3.1 ports.

  1. Would the Brix be able to handle the aforementioned data volumes, or should a PCIe/NVMe card with Optane memory be installed so it can function as a core for Roon Rock?**

Alternatively, there’s an Asus VM65N with a dual-core i5, 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 RAM, and a 256GB SSD. The large hard drive(s) would then be connected to one of the USB 3.1 ports.

  1. Would the Asus also be able to handle the aforementioned data volumes, or would a PCIe/NVMe card (possibly with Optane memory) also need to be installed as a core for Roon Rock?**

To establish the connection to the T+A Balanced Music Player, I’ve purchased a Raspberry Pi 4 as a Roon Bridge. It has 2GB of RAM and a 16GB SD card. Roipeee will run on the SD card. I plan to connect the Pi 4 via LAN.

  1. What are the Roon community’s thoughts on this? Can someone answer my questions or give me some advice?

kindest regards
Harald

4

That’s about 240k tracks, I’d go with an i7 and 32 GB of RAM personally.

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5

This model neither a NUC nor officially supported. It also has more cores/threads (10/12), so is unlikely to be the best choice.

See the official documentation, and opt for an ASUS NUC 13 Pro (Intel Core i7, tall) with a minimum of 16 GB.

You won’t get 20 TB into any NUC, so consider something like the 28 TB Expansion Desktop. This will also may life easier when transferring media.

The Raspberry Pi is perfect for a network streamer.

6

for a library that size I would wonder if a NUC was the device .

I suspect big library users would be heading for a dedicated desktop i7 or even i9 with loads of RAM 32 at least.

Don’t forget the CPU in NUC are much lower powered than their desktop equivalents

I am a (long term, experienced) Windows user so I would use W11 but many users are on Linux

I would wait for a Roon user with a comparable library to comment

Mine is NUC 10 i7 32Gb with around 120k tracks and that works OK , I have tracks not included routinely , if I add then say 200k Track I notice a distinct tail off

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