I am about to make the leap from Minimserver & Asset UPnP to Roon. Although I read the FAQs and did some research in the forum here, I still am not sure, whether I properly understood one important fact.
I will be getting a fanless NUC (i5, 32GB RAM).
My extensively (special tags as well) and thoroughly tagged music collection (FLAC, DSF) is sitting on a 8TB SSD with an artist/album structure.
Roon/ROCK comes preinstalled on the NUC’s M.2 SSD (afaik). There is an additional SATA cable present.
I would like to attach my 8TB SSD to that very SATA cable. That’s, when my questions/concerns come in:
Will ROCK treat this SSD just like an additional drive, assign an internal drive letter and then let me choose this drive as the music source, keeping the files?
Furthermore, even more important: will ROCK NOT touch or alter these files and their tags in any way, but just index the music into the database, which I suppose is residing on the M.2 SSD?
What will happen with all the albums, that I have in different versions (they have individual album names like “original CD” or “HiRes version” etc.)
Will I later on be able to copy new music into this very folder structure via SMB?
I have two streaming clients in the house, that are not Roon compatible. Is there any way to additionally install Asset UPnP and/or Minimserver on that NUC?
If the above mentioned questions pose a problem, what would you suggest I should do?
It will show as „ROCK Internal Storage“ in Settings > Storage
No. You MUST format it which will erase everything.
The internal drive is formatted from the web interface when you first set up ROCK, so you won’t be able pre-load music onto the drive – you’ll start with an empty drive, and copy your music over later
If you want to avoid this, you could put your SSD into a USB enclosure and attach it to the ROCK s as an external disk.
They will be be shown as different versions of an album. You can configure what it is that determines an album version in Settings > Library > Import Settings > Album Version Settings.
You have to copy everything to the internal storage over the network after formatting. You can later add to this at any time. (You can also do this if the disk is attached by USB to the ROCK)
One is an older Linn Klimax DS (LAN). Problem there: it is Roon tested, but relies on a RS232 connection to the Linn preamp for volume control. According to Linn, I will lose volume control with Roon in that case.
The other streaming client are Yamaha MusicCast speakers in the study (Wireless LAN).
Thank you very much for your extensive answer, that was very helpful. I had read the fact about the formatting, but wrongly assumed, that it only applied to the main drive for the OS.
I see the problem. Maybe the best solution then is to install the operating system you prefer on the NUC (Windows or Linux, or get a Mac Mini if you like macOS) and install Roon as well as the UPnP server.
As @Suedkiez says if you put the 8Tb SSD into the NUC you have no option but to format it via ROCK and lose its content. There is no disadvantage to an external drive over an internal drive (i have both) other than one compact unit.
I keep a 4Tb HDD in my main Windows PC that feeds JRiver (I edit metadata here), then I sync using SyncBack Pro to a copy/sync to a 4Tb SSD in the NUC. So the main PC is always the master and always up to date . It has the advantage that any adjustments to say metadata are made before Roon imports a file rather than altering a file that is under Roon’s library control…
You will need a back up of these files anyway even if you keep them on the NUC SSD, so maybe use it wisely. I have 2 x 4Tb USB HDD external drives which are sync’ed with the main PC as backups
All CD ripping, downloading of acquired HiRes music, tagging etc. takes place on a small Windows Homeserver in the study, music resides on a dedicated HDD.
Backup is done whenever there is new music on an external hard drive
The 8 TB SSD is mounted in a small Raspberry Pi enclosure in the living room and synced via GoodSync with the home server. This runs Asset UPnP and Minimserver. This one will be replaced with the fanless NUC running Roon/Rock.
So putting the SSD into the NUC would require it to be formatted by ROCK and a major copy exercise, just the once . The NUC is quite small and the internal drive as opposed to external gives a much neater job but at the expense of that big copy . That copy I expect could be managed by your sync software (I don’t know that one but it’s probably similar to SyncBack copying only files that have changed.)
If you go that route then Stop the Roon server from the Web Admin page until the copy is complete . Roon will import the files and store in the db and it will take a while for that much data. If I read correctly you haven’t started with Roon yet so you have no db ?
If your library is very large you could install the 8T drive in the NUC and format it. Then shut the NUC down and remove the drive. Connect the drive directly to your Home server machine and copy the Music to the drive. Then install it back into the NUC. So no copying over the network, which is much slower than the direct connect. This adds a little bit of work, but depending on how big your library is it might be worth it to save a bunch of time.
I bought a drive adapter so that I can plug “internal” drives in like an external USB drive for operations like this. It is useful for when friends and family crash their computers and ask me to recover their photos and data off their drives.
The drive will be formatted with the EXT4 Linux file system, so out of the box this only works with Linux computers because macOS and Windows don’t have built-in support. (Though there are 3rd-party EXT4 filesystem drivers for Windows and Mac from Paragon Software)
True but then you have to do this in WSL and it’s not out of the box. Though it’s reasonably simple and it avoids having to use Paragon‘s driver and its license fee.
The SSD is already formatted with EXT4, and my Windows HomeServer actually has the Paragon EXT4 driver installed.
When I introduced the 8 TB SSD in the system, I did have to do this huge copy job. First, I started to do this by internally mounting the SSD into the HomeServer. Copy speeds were below 10MB/s - I attributed this to the strain, the Paragon driver seemed to put on the processor.
So I stopped the process and mounted the SSD in my Raspberry Pi: 80-90 MB/s over Network!