I’m receiving a larger number of ROCK dropouts than previously (my guesstimate is at least once per day the last two weeks). Often it fixes itself; only once did I resort to restarting the ROCK.
My library is located on a HDD drive hanging from the ROCK via USB. The ROCK is a 7i7BNH and has been troublefree, but it is approaching 5 years old. I did notice weak internet on my TV reception last week, but no other appliances have shown flaky behavior.
What might be causing this? I know not of the movings of the 1’s and 0’s through my system. Could my internet connection be at issue (it’s Spectrum Cable 500mbps)? Or would you focus on the network fidelity? All connections are wired except for my remote units.
I need some help trapping and identifying the error and determining where to troubleshoot. Any help appreciated
Thanks for writing in! It’s definitely worth checking the fan if you find your ROCK is working hard over simple functions.
We’ll need a specific date, time, or name of track playing the next time this happens - from there, we’ll enable diagnostics on your sever and review a fresh set of Roon logs that will help pinpoint more information around the stoppage.
Today at 8pm CST, I got an error message that the Roon server connection had been interrupted. Note my wording; the actual dropping could have happened much earlier when the remote (Mac Pro) was idle.
I looked inside the ROCK. It appeared clean without any dust at all. The unit was warm to the touch, but I don’t imagine that’s worrisome for an i7 unit.
Whilst I would certainly go with less drastic cleaning solutions mentioned previously in the first instance, at 5 years old, and in continuous use, it is possible that the thermal compound between the CPU and the heatsink is starting to age to the point where it is becoming less efficient moving heat away from the CPU.
Certainly at some point in the next couple of years, you should consider separating the heatsink from the CPU, cleaning both surfaces with some isopropyl alchohol and then applying a very small quantity of good quality thermal paste before re-assembling. These thermal compounds typically last for a maximum of 8 years.
The thermal paste that I use is Artic MX4 but there are plenty of others on the market. However, if you have never done it before, steer clear of the ‘liquid metal’ type compounds. These offer better thermal conductivity (better cooling) but are quite a bit harder to apply correctly and the consequences of getting it wrong are much more severe. Normal thermal compounds are designed to be non-conductive (electrically) so if they get where they shouldn’t, they don’t do much harm. Liquid metal compounds, by contrast, are electrically very conductive and, if they get where they shouln’t, they can do very much harm indeed.
Are you by any chance making use of a duel IPv4/IPv6 network setup? Are you able to try to temporarily disable IPv6 to see if it helps? Also, if you’re not using extensions, please try to disable these as well, you can do so under Roon Settings → Extensions, this can allow us to better read the error logging for clues.
