I have a NUC 8i7 BEH2 with 8GB RAM and an external 10TB hard drive G-drive connected via USB C. Installed Roon ROCK 1.7 build 610. When playing a song, I would expect Roon to load the song into its buffer. But, the hard drive is active almost through the entire song, except for a few seconds at the end, indicating that very little is buffered and there is continuous reading from the ext hard drive? Seems peculiar to me, and I am concerned about the constant noise from the hard drive and also worried the hard drive may wear out. Can someone explain to me why Rock does not buffer the complete song?
Note that it may be active for many reasons, including metadata updates and audio analysis.
Get an SSD if you are concerned about audible noise. If you are concerned about electrical or magnetic noise mucking something up in an improperly shielded system, move your DAC far away from your server using a network.
You shouldn’t be. The wear you could possibly put on a drive with Roon is inconsequential to anything.
It’s Roon, and not ROCK – ROCK has nothing to do with the audio. Roon doesn’t do excessive buffering because it has the potential to make the experience worse, and there is no definitive proof it does anything that can’t be done better in another way (like moving the DAC away from the “computery” parts of the system).