With the new ROCK, I have read here that people with install there NUc with ROCK and stream their music from a NAS! But a powerful NAS can handle ROONpretty well! So I wonder what are the advantages and disadvantages of this sit up vs just using a NAS???
ROCK is designed to be virtually maintenance free and more powerful than most NAS devices.
A NAS can be used for more than just music, like backups etc.
Does Rock support music backups to a different disk?
NAS providers aren’t checking whether updates to their firmware are compatible with Roon or not.
My NUC is also considerably more powerful than my NAS.
If you want to do DSP (e.g. room correction), then a NAS is unlikely to have sufficient power to handle it. I’m using room correction in one zone, and my i3 NUC with ROCK can just about deal with it, while streaming to other zones. If I wanted to handle more zones with DSP simultaneously, then I’d need to step up to an i5 or i7 NUC.
ROCK is carefully tuned to the (NUC) hardware and very minimal: it has what you need to run Roon Server in an optimal way and nothing more. It will give the best performance for running Roon on the given hardware.
NASes in the same hardware league tend to be rather expensive, running multi-purpose Linux variants with an extensive GUI slapped on top. Jacks of all trades, masters of none.
Very interesting replies!!! But it raises two more questions…
If I have a NUC for Roon and a NAS, why would I want to stream my music files from the NAS instead of leaving them on the NUC?
Is there a maximum storage that I can have on the NUC for my music files???
Thanks!!!
With the current HDD technology, I believe the maximum capacity for an internal HDD in the Intel NUCs will be 2TB. Drives thicker than 9.5mm won’t fit, and 3TB drives are 15mm I think. If you used an SSD, then, for a price, you could have 4TB internal storage.
There’s also the point that an HDD in the NUC will contribute to noise (I’m talking about sound, not electrical noise), so if you wanted a truly silent ROCK configuration (like Roon’s Nucleus boxes), then you would either (a) drop the internal storage of files in a fanless case, or (b) use a much more expensive SSD.
Yes you are limited by the available sizes of 2.5" drives of 9.5mm or thinner which limits you to 2Tb with spinny disk AFAIK. You may get a larger SSD but you will need even larger pockets.
Is the Roon Nucleus box limited to 9.5mm drives as it is a different case design?
All this talk of limitations is for internal drives.
You can plug a USB drive into a NUC or Nucleus.
I would prefer that over a NAS, fewer moving parts.
You got to have a powerful NAS, then even DSP is fine.
I already have a DS918+ 8G ramwith SSD cache for all my music, movie files, host torrent seed, file sharing to Mac.
Installed Roon Core and Harmony extension on it. Roon control loads music promptly. Upsampling to DSD 128 works fine (speed 1x). CPU goes to 50/60% sometimes. Usually its around 20% with all these things running.
Roon process is quite RAM demanding, it takes 640M memory when I am looking at it now.
I don’t have NUC/Nucleus, so can’t compare SQ, but so far I can’t see any reason there will be SQ difference.
As I know, Roon Core for Synology is just developed by a user. If he doesn’t do it anymore I may be forced to migrate to other platform? That’s the only thing I worry in future.