Hello, I’m new to roon and just installed (4 days ago) the Core on my 2017 iMac running OS 10.13.3. My audio files reside on a QNAP TS-431P NAS. My connection is Gb Ethernet. I have noticed that with roon running and not playing anything, the NAS makes what sounds like a HDD access noise every 5-10 seconds. Non-stop. If I quit roon on my iMac and wait about 20 seconds the noise goes away unless I actually access files on the NAS. It’s kind of annoying to listen to while working and I’m a bit worried about HDD wear.
Thanks Mr. Fix It. When I first launch roon I get the spinning circle in the upper right but it goes away in about 15 seconds.
I did have Background Audio Analysis Speed set to Fast (2 Cores) but just changed it to Off, quit roon, launched roon and waited 2 minutes and that drive access noise continues.
I believe this is expected behavior (mine does the same). Roon uses very little RAM buffering at both the source and destination end. It does not open the full track into RAM at the beginning of playback. Therefore, it is reading small chunks frequently.
The justification for this has been discussed elsewhere in the forum.
Roon watches “in real time” folders setup in the “Storage” section of Roon preferences. The only way Roon could do this would be to access the storage every few seconds to see if any new music has been added. I don’t know what “few” is in this case, but I would not be surprised if it is less than 10 seconds.
I don’t have a NAS, but the (large) hard drives in my PC access the hard drives constantly while I am NOT using Roon. No analysis being done as far as I can tell (no spinning icon, no audio analysis in settings). I keep my PC on most of the time and can see the hard drive light going constantly while I am watching TV, etc. Doesn’t really bother me, but it is curious…
Your PC’s OS is accessing that drive doing all kinds of things. While the NAS’s OS does things occasionally, Roon accessing it every 5-10 seconds while idle just doesn’t seem right.
If you disable the watch folder on the NAS in Roon on your iMac, does the noise continue? I want to discern if this behavior is being caused by the new file discovery service or the general device discovery service.
In order to get to the root of this issue, I would recommend using the QNAP utilities to find the culprit of the constant disk access. I’ve included the link the QNAP wiki here.
