Just received my Nucleus and looked through all the help pages for a recommendation on what to buy for the internal SSD but can’t find an answer. What is the recommended SSD to install?
More or less any 2.5 inch form factor sata HDD or SSD will be fine. Just check the maximum allowed thickness. I believe a new Nucleus will accommodate drives up to 15mm thick. Almost all 2.5 n HDDs and SSDs will comply with this restriction.
The reason for going the SSD route are:
No mechanical noise (only important if your nucleus is in the listening room)
Larger available capacities.
There is no need to pay for a high performance SSD. Nor is there a need to opt for one that supports lots of writing every day because you will typically copy your media files to it once and thereafter only add to your media library.
Consequently, for SSDs, the Samsung 870 QVO series are perfectly adequate. They range in capacity (and price) from 1TB (~£80 in the UK) to 8TB (over £450 in the UK).
External.usb hd work just fine and have potentially some benefits. Keep in mind you cannot use the internal.storage drive to do database backups. You will need an attached external drive or a network location you setup.
Two very helpful answers, thanks guys. This begs the next question - why do I even need storage? I stream (Tidal) my music, I have no saved albums that I own. I do create playlists and save albums but surely that is all saved in the Roon cloud that I pay monthly for. Why storage and why backup? To my mind you would only need these if you had saved offline music files that you wanted to listen to. Please excuse my ignorance, just learning all this.
Not quite. Nothing is stored in the Roon cloud. Playlists, tagging and any other album edits (metadata) performed within Roon are stored in the Roon database which, on Nucleus and ROCK devices, is located on the OS SSD.
This leads to:
Storage, you may or may not need but backups should be performed. As @Rugby said, database backups can be performed to USB attached external storage but not internal storage. Alternatively, database backups can be made to a network location but this can be more difficult to set up if you are not used to doing such things.
The Roon database backup (built into the Roon server software) does not back up media files. If you did have any, you would have to make sure that they were backed up by some other method.
Since you don’t have any local media files, there is no point in adding internal storage to your Nucleus unless you intend to add local media files in the future. Even then, you would probably be better with an external SDD or HDD connected by USB that you could use for backup now and media if the need should arise in the future. Only if you start acquiring a significant local library would it, possibly, be worth thinking about adding internal storage.
If you’ve made metadata edits which you’d be reluctant to lose, it might be good practice to backup your Roon database to a local usb thumb drive from time to time. Just plug it directly into your Nucleus and select it in settings > backup
Roon saves nothing in the cloud, that is all saved in your local database on the RoonServer. If it goes and you don’t have a backup, then, you will have lost any playlists you’ve created, play counts, edits.
Any Tidal albums you added to your library would be re-added in such an event. But, one should always, imho, have a good up to date backup of their database.
I assumed you had local music or why else ask about recommended SSDs to install. The Nucleus has its OS disk already. The only reason to add an SSD is for local music storage. Especially since it cannot be used to backup the database to.
I would only add that you should calculate how large you would expect your library to be in the next 12 mos and then at least 4x that figure. It’s a hassle transferring your library onto a new drive. Best to leave plenty of spare room and only do it rarely.
Wow, you guys are so helpful and willing to share - happy to have found this community - thank you. I have no doubts now, your answers and explanations couldn’t have been any clearer! Till next time ( and there will be a next time!).