There are many things to say about this but you find them all if you search the forum, so not much point in repeating them.
If someone wants all this, they can already install any Linux distro and Roon Server. There’s no point in recreating that with Roon OS.
You can’t. Just like you can’t run diagnostics on ROCK to verify RAM or Drive health. Nor can you monitor the CPU temperature. If you want to do those things, then you use a different Operating System.
Which you cannot do with ROCK as it has been locked down. And pointed out by other users.
There is always a need to monitor a system, imho. Monitoring the system or having the ability to run diagnostics allows users early warning signs of potential hardware issues. Currently, a user will run blind until something dies.
ROCK should be like my car, which, runs monthly diagnostics and emails the results to me to let me know if there is something that needs looking into.
My R.O.C.K. / NUC’s performance has been a mystery to me for a while.
Occasionally, there’s a lag while rendering/loading an album in the Mac OS remote but playback start has always been speedy.
However, the real mystery is how the fan will sometimes rev up even though R.O.C.K. is not scanning the library nor is anything being played.
I’ve checked NAS CPU, bandwidth and RAM usage during a R.O.C.K. scan or playback and it barely measures.
2.3 GHz Intel i5 Quad-Core
16 GB RAM
~2200 albums
I foresee the day when all my appliances start doing this - I can’t say that I’m looking forward to it. 
Because its music server not data centre server its meant to be a plug n play black box
If you want to tinker put Roon on desktop
I would never run an app like Roon on a nas for a couple of reasons:
Most of the conversation about running Roon OS or any other OS that has been modified for paring down processes running to give Roon more resources, if running Roon on the nas, the nas is already busy accessing data and you are placing Roon processes on top of that. Nas has much more overhead managing raid activity compared to a Mac or normal Linux server accessing 1 disk.
Just because it’s a music server, doesn’t mean it’s a paperweight when it stops working or running very slow. If I’m spending thousands on a music server/streamer, I want that box up and running efficiently everytime I want to listen to music.
Yep, it happens. However, there is no way to tell, except by going through the logs at the time of the sound and seeing if there is anything in them that gives a clue.
Yeah, my dishwasher texts me when the rinse aid is low and gives me energy usage stats. The one I wish I had gotten connected is my washer/dryer. Being on a different floor, it would be useful to know that state of the wash or drying cycle without having to go up and down stairs.
I was running roon on several different NAS models for years and absolutely cannot confirm what you are stating.
I call tell you from practical experience, this is not an issue at all. Usual NAS applications eat up only a few percent of one single core, and roon is picking up another one if intense operations are performed. Regarding system power consumed by RAID operations I can only speak for QTS based systems but these definitely run faster with RAID1 as random access is possible on the 2 HDD separately. CPU and RAM consumption for RAID are negligible.
Roon on a NAS is certainly not a solution for everyone as these systems require a certain attention to maintenance as well as knowledge how to deal with the system OS (with QTS being the most complicated but also the most powerful in my understanding). On the other hand the monitoring tools are great (especially if you use magnetic HDD) and redundancy/backup/restore/capacity options are simply unrivaled.
Thanks for all of your suggestions. I tried them all where I could including:
Nothing worked
So I upgraded to a fanless mini-PC from Inside Tech (as NUC are not available any more) running an I-7 11th generation processor.
It is fantastic - it is so fast I can’t quite believe it!
Why would anybody run Roon on a nas? The top of the line nas units for personal use are pretty weak in the hardware area. From some of them I looked at had small amount of ram (4G), dual cores, and no solid state storage to run Roon on.
For better performance when running larger Roon libraries, 16g of ram is recommended, ssd for Roon app and indexing, and faster core, not the slower cores you see in nas units.
Why not get a decent arm computer running Ubuntu or another flavor, 16 or 32g of ram, multiple fast cores, run software raid like mdadm using RAID 5. This will give you the capability to diagnose any degradation, any raid level you may want (raid 5 is ideal for a music or video server), and increase hardware resources like memory or internal disks (solid state or hd) depending on needs.
Actually there are lots of reasons for that. You named a few yourself, like having RAID1 or RAID5, RAM expandable to 32GB, diagnose drives without having to install anything, plus having multiple fast cores. I would add app control, energy management, hot plug drive swapping and maintenance/security updates. A NAS is anyways a pretty logical way to store a big and irreplaceable library which would not fit on an internal SSD of a device like Nucleus One. So why not run roon on it if you anyways need one?
Have tried a lot of different models and can absolutely not agree to that claim. If we are talking about the better-equipped home NAS in the price range of a Nucleus One (400 to 500 bucks for a 2-bay), we find models being equipped with absolutely capable CPU (Fastest Celerons dubbed ´Jasper Lake´generation or R1600 AMDs, both significantly faster than original Nucleus), 8 GB of RAM, in many cases expandable to 16 or 32GB, and in most of cases 2 or more additional M.2/NVMe Slots. So SSD for running roon software plus internal database plus additional caching is not a problem.
Most of the aforementioned models are equipped with quad core CPU (same type of CPU as Nucleus One) anyways and they handle a library up to 100k with ease. The only dual core exception is AMD Ryzen R1600 which is a 4-thread model and fast enough to run roon with big libraries exceeding 100,000 tracks if you do not plan to do crazy multitasking stuff such as 4 high end grade streams plus 4K video crosscoding at the same time.
If you plan to run a very very big library (200k tracks or very complicated structure) and need a very powerful CPU, you indeed have to pay a bit more if you want to do that on a NAS. Would assume that in most of cases it is still cheaper than buying a suitable NAS with weaker hardware plus similarly powerful Mini computer.
If you say so, but when I look at 4 and 6 bay synology nas units for home, they have a 2 core celeron cpu, 2G ram expandable to 6g. So after you take the resources to run a nas, you have very little to run roon.
I used, went to school for EMC Symmetrix SAN, and managed employees running million $ SANs and NAS units in large enterprises. I then went to work for the top manufacturer of disk arrays for enterprises, then worked for the #1 manufacturer of disk drives and solid state storage. I was the techie who developed best case scenarios on how to implement these devices in large enterprises. Over 15 years ago, I wrote a white paper on why DAS is better than NAS or SAN, and I would still stand by this today.
Also, the cheap nas units for home use are just that; cheap. Too many single points of failure, and that’s why you invest in a NAS or SAN.
For me, I would buy a 2013 trash can Mac with 6 or 8 cores, 32g or 64g of ram, running Ubuntu or similar, hook up multiple disks, 1 per port, then run mdadm to build a raid 5 for all my data. You would have plenty of computer resources to operate the raid and run roon and anything else if you needed too.
6GB and a good dual core Celeron are perfectly fine for a small library of 10 or 20k tracks as there is plenty of CPU power left for roon.
If you have more tracks and want to run Synology, it is advisable to - as previously mentioned - avoid the cheapest entry-level models and opt for a more modern unit like DS723+ or DS923+.
I personally would not want to have my precious local collection on a machine which was made for a different purpose 10+ years old having multiple potential failure points. I prefer a modern NAS which has all the options like RAID1/RAID5 pre-installed and in case of a failure offers redundancy and easy restore and warranty. But it is a matter of personal taste so everyone can choose. Just do not like to have a solution which works for many people denigrated because some other people are not familiar with specs of modern units.
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.