I am presently running Roon Core on a fanless NUC with Rock installed which is great.
Prior to the NUC Roon Server as running on my Synology DS218+ but performance was not acceptable.
My music library consists of about 90k tracks, most of them lossless files (FLAC) but hardly any HiRes files „better“ than 96/24.
I am using Roons downsampling options in one room when streaming to my vintage stereo system with a DAC capable of max 48/16.
I intend to use room correction feastures in the future.
After having read in another thread that Roon Server running on a DS720+ is working very well I am to give Roon Server on a Synology another try:
I am planning to upgrade to a DS72x+ model in any case and just wondering which version might be better for running Roon Server:
The DS723+
has a significantly faster CPU (no Intel anymore) but no GPU on board anymore
allows RAM of upto 32GB
will be served longer by Synology as the 720+ which was introduced in summer 2020
The price differential here in Germany is less than 100 Euro so not too significant.
So I am wondering which NAS would give the better performance as a Roon Core?
my 720+ (replacement for my trusted 716+ that had it’s first HDD failure after running 7 years!) runs reliably since several weeks now - downgraded it to OS 6 because I can use the ALSA interface no longer available in 7.n - my ADI-2 DAC is connected to the 720+ using USB. My library is roughly the same, from FLAC to DSD:
Roon core runs on the internal SSD (I don’t use them as cache). I added 16 GB of memory. I’m running Roon now (Mahler 2 at 192/24) and I seldom have CPU more than 10% and RAM more than 25%.
I don’t know whether the GPU does anything good providing the music but I read that the 723+ has a configurable LAN network interface. So this may be a reason to get the new model.
Thanks to all of you for your quick and helpful comments.
I think I will go for a new DS720+ (with 3 year full warranty) as I am not sure if a 723+ will be any improvement at all besides I don’t even know if the AMD Ryzen R1600 will work at all.
In a worst case scenario I will not be happy with the performance of the 720+ as a Roon Core but still have a nice NAS upgrade and just keep my fanless NUC as a Roon Core .
R1600 in 1522+ works fine as well (although for DSD256 top PCM/DSP back to DSD256 it runs out of the default 8GB of RAM quickly; when a new memory stick arrives will test if the CPU itself is fast enough with more memory).
In PCM-only world, it has no problem supporting more than 1 endpoint, and applies conversion/convolution at ~25x speed, so I think Ryzen 1600 should be good enough.
Looking at memory usage, trying to do DSD256 → PCM/DSP → DSD256 still runs out of memory (although somewhat later) but then if you’ve converted it to PCM, moving back to DSD makes little sense anyway. Everything else, including playing highest resolution DXD tracks I have with DSP to multiple endpoints is not a problem.
I am up to ~37K tracks now, and with M2 cache in Synology performance of the UI itself is perfectly fine despiute all data (including Roon’s DB) being on spinning disks.
A friend of mine recently bought an outdated synology NAS like the aforementioned DS720+ to run Roon on it. The problem with these devices is that RAM is limited to 6GB (2+4). In combination with the Celeron CPU it is not really suitable for large libraries (he has 140k tracks).
I would go for the 723+ if the AMD Ryzen is capable of running Roon (which it is said to but I did not test that). It easily allows 16GB of RAM (even 32 if I am not mistaken) and might even offer some improvement compared to the Celeron.
Running Roon on a Ryzen-based Synology with no issues. Not something I’d use if planning on using heavy DSP (DSD conversions, mostly) but perfectly fine otherwise.
@KMM that’s very interesting because the DS720+ spec sheet I have seen was clearly stating that maximum RAM is 6 GB. That is kind of consistent as this version had a Celeron J4125 installed which can address up to 8GB theoretically but one 2GB bar is preinstalled and one more slot can handle up to 4GB.
Maybe there is another version of DS720+ around with a completely different CPU?
AFAIK there is only one version of the 720+. I have to correct my earlier post, I added an 8GB stick for a total of 10 GB. ( Crucial CT8G4SFS8266 8GB (DDR4, 2666 MT/s, PC4-21300, Single Rank x8, SODIMM, 260-Pin)
Here is a screen shot of the 720+ info page
Roon seems to like just over a gig of memory and a little cpu.
my 720+ runs 4 IP security cams plus Roon, Roon DB is on an internal SSD while data is on a 8gig spinning disk.
Runs fine and is quite responsive.
I did try a M2 Mac Mini for a day, yes it was faster but not enough to warrant the extra purchase price.
My NAS was for data storage and CCTV, so I class it as running Roon for Free.
I have 6gig installed.
@Phil I think it is very much depending on your library size and its structure. And of course which resource-consuming operations you are running with roon.
When testing the Synology library was just above 80k tracks but quite a lot of classical music with plenty of database interdependencies. In idling Roon was already eating up 2.5GB of RAM. When performing resource-intensive operations this increased significantly and so did CPU usage.
@arindal Curiosity took the better of me. Received a Corsair Vengeance SODIMM 16GB (1x16GB) DDR4 2666MHz CL18 stick today and installed it. Worked right away and current Synology OS addresses the 16 GB stick correctly for a total of 18 GB. Full disclosure:
Roon database runs on a 500 GB external SSD via e-Sata
2 250 GB M2 SSDs as Read/Write cache
2* 4 TB NAS HDDs
It is overkill for sure for my <15.000 tracks library and it works very well shown here with 5 zones all upsampling to 192kHz of which 2 run additional DSP duty with a convolution filter at 131k taps each
