Roon Nucleus+ (only for Roon Core, no Music Files) and Server Qnap TVS-872XT-i5-16G (only for Music Files and Backup)

Roon Software Discussion Nucleus
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Roon Nucleus+ (only for Roon Core, no Music Files) and Server Qnap TVS-872XT-i5-16G (only for Music Files + Backup)

Dear Roon Community,

I have a Roon Nucleus+ with:

  • internal Samsung SSD 4 TB, this SSD is full of music files, no more space,
    this SSD was formatted by the Roon-Software

  • external USB Samsung SSD 4 TB, this SSD is full of music files, no more space,
    this SSD was formatted from Windows 10 to NTFS and is fully Windows readable

I have ordered a separate server Qnap TVS-872XT-i5-16G and two Samsung SSD 8 TB for this Qnap server.

I would like to make the following new device arrangement in my home network:

  • Roon Nucleus+ is for Roon Core software only, not for music files

  • Server Qnap TVS-872XT-i5-16G is for the music files only and for the backup of the Roon Library data

This is my plan for more music file capacity in the future,
I do not want a Roon Core on the separate Qnap server,
the Roon Nucleus+ remains the central Roon Core unit, but without music files,
with Melco servers it works like this.

Now my questions:

  1. the music albums of the two 4 TB SSD’s, internal and external, are to be moved to the server Qnap without the tag processing, e.g. renaming of about 700 music albums and further tag processing, which must not be lost.

What should be taken into account during this process without the need for costly rework?
Please provide detailed information.

2 Where is the Roon Data Base library stored, in the Roon Nucleus+?

  1. the internal Samsung SSD 4 TB is to be removed from the Roon Nucleus+, will the Roon Nucleus+ still work with an external server Qnap?

Many thanks

Michael
near Basel Switzerland
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One word of warning if you going to use the Qnap as music source. Roon will now longer pick up instant changes to your library when adding files to the Qnap music location. This is down to a limitation of how Nas devices communicate file system changes over the network. So Roon will only pick up changes on a regular rescan which by default is every 4 hours. You can change this to be less but means the core is doing more work more often. Or you can just force a rescan after you have added new files.

When you setup Roon and the Nucleus it would have prompted you to set a location to backup it’s database. If you did not do this then it’s likely never been backed up. You should set this up now. You can add a location from the Qnap for this or backup to a usb stick plugged into the Nucleus. You should never back up the database to the same storage as your music.

You cannot just plug the internal drive from the Nucleus into your Nas enclosure and expect it to work.The Nas will want to reformat it. Only way to preserve the data would be to use a usb enclosure and plug it in externally and treat it as a USB drive. You should be able to just plug in the existing usb drive. However doing this your not getting the benefit of using faster access of drives internally or the safety of the Nas filesystem. Your best transferring all the files to internal storage on the Qnap. I would maintain the folder structure you have now as much as possible. Do not remove the drive in the Nucleus or the usb drive before disabling the storage locations in the Roon storage section. Personally I would keep the internal drive in the nucleus as you can have music across many storage locations.

When this is done and you have you files on the Nas. You will need to add the Qnap to Roon. You edit the existing storage location to point to the Qnap and reenable it. There are details on how to add network storage in the Nucleus and Roon KB. Once added it will go through the scanning and linking procedure , this will take a long time given how much music you have. Just leave to to get on with it. At first it will look like it’s adding them all again as new entries but it will resolve all this towards the end of the procedure and it will all link back up and preserve the edits you have made.

I did this in reverse to you and went from Nas to local storage on Rock as its faster overall and updates instantly.

https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/migration#:~:text=Your%20Roon%20database%20contains%20your,database%20from%20old%20to%20new.

1 Like
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May I ask why you would like to set things up this way ?

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Dear CrystalGipsySimon and dear Xekomi

thank you for your feedback.

Why do I want to outsource all music files / music albums from the Roon Nucleus to an external NAS?

The Roon Nucleus hardware is a absolut great system with the Roon software, but unfortunately it was not thought through to its practical end.

The Roon Nucleus is a kind of stand-alone PC.

Every PC today offers the possibility to connect several HDD’s / SSD’s.
In my opinion it was missed here to be able to retrofit 2 or 4 HDD’s / SSD’s internally.

The 2 USB-A ports on the Nucleus can be connected to other devices;
apart from that, today a maximum of 4 TB SSD can be connected to the Nucleus via USB-A and for this a very special external USB-A case is needed, which must be Linux compatible in any case to work.

In my case the internal 4 TB SSD and the external 4 TB SSD are full.

I am now upgrading internally to 8 TB SSD, which is the maximum today,
I fear a very time-consuming reworking of previous TAG edits
and the “every year again”,
from 8 TB to 12 TB, from 12 TB to 16 TB, from 16 TB to 20 TB SSD’s
and 20 TB SSD’s will not be available for a long time, if so, they will be extremely expensive.

My internal upgrade will only free another 4 TB
and these will probably be exhausted again after about 1 to 2 years.

This will be the same for other Roon Nucleus users.

Roon Labs should definitely revise the Nucleus hardware concept in this way,
that several internal HDD’s / SSD’s can be installed, and it is essential to create more possibilities to connect more external devices,
or to use an additional external NAS for the music files.

This is the reason why I want to switch to an 8 Bay Qnap NAS.

Thanks a lot

Michael
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If you follow the migration information I posted you won’t have any tag edits to do at all. Adding in new storage doesn’t change this as long as you do it properly Roon will relink where ever the files are. You can add any usb drive to the Nucleus so I don’t understand your post about being Linux specific, infact Roon recommends exfat which works across anything. Only internal drive has to be formatted for the nucleus specifically as ext4.

2 Likes
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Dear CrystalGipsySimon and dear Xekomi

Thank you very much for your feedback.

I am currently only using SSD’s internally and externally with the Roon Nucleus,

this on the recommendation of the HiFi specialist media, the Roon Forum and Roon Vertrieb Germany + Switzerland, as well as Roon Sales,

due to no running noise, less heating, lower energy consumption and faster file access, no mechanical wear
as well as lower susceptibility to failure, it was reported to me and recommended.

The internal SSD limitation from first to 4 TB and today to 8 TB is from @danny.

The info that a maximum of 4 TB SSD in external USB-A case is possible,
comes from different computer accessory suppliers, it worked for me, 8 TB SSD operation via external USB-A case should not be possible today, I haven’t seen one yet.

The operation of a new Samsung Portable SSD T7 with 2 TB via USB-A connection did not work.
Only one third of the music title was played, then the music playback was interrupted with a message: Data rate too low.

Possibly this SSD is not compatible for Linux based systems, compatibility is only shown for Windows, MAC and Android.

With the older Samsung Portable USB-A SSD T5 models, with 1 and 2 TB I also had problems starting the Roon Nucleus.

I have not used rotating hard disks in my PC systems for a long time.

So I plan to use SSD’s in the Qnap server, regarding faster file access and less heat development, as well as no noise.

The two USB-A ports on the Roon Nucleus are needed for other devices, so I am already limited here.

If a Qnap server can also be connected to the Roon Nucleus via USB-A, I don’t know if this works.

@CrystalGipsySimon,
I have to read your migration information again,
to understand them.
Until now I have not understood them, I will contact you with questions here.

Thank you very much and have a nice Saturday evening.

Best regards

Michael
.

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Or just use a streaming service for the majority and only store that which isn’t available or your preferred version. Could easily drop your attached storage needs drastically.

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Dear Xekomi,

the recorded music files have the following extension:
aif, flac, wav, dsf, in 16/48, 24/96 and DSD64 format,
there are already a few tens of thousands of albums, but not 10,000.

Well, it doesn’t change my storage status, 8 TB of SSD capacity is full and I’m still not done recording.

Dear Xekomi, there is no point in questioning this,
I simply don’t have any space left and will therefore switch to an external server Qnap,
USB-A external SSD cases have only been a temporary solution,
which I am already at the end of my rope.

I thank you and wish you a nice evening.

Best regards

Michael
.

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@Michael_Strickrodt - I can confirm this. I went in the revere direction in preparation for some travel I have planned: I copied my entire local library from my Synology NAS to a portable USB hard drive. After I did that, all I had to do was edit the storage location under Storage settings.

Screen Shot 2020-11-28 at 11.59.56 AM
Screen Shot 2020-11-28 at 11.59.56 AM1700Ă—570 69.9 KB

After I did this, I did a “Force Rescan” just to verify that all was good. There were no changes, and (thankfully), my little netbook Core did not even have to re-analize any of the tracks.

Now, the file structure has to be identical, right down to the time stamps on the files. To ensure this, I used a Linux command called rsync.

In my case, the command-line that I used looks like this:

rsync -avHDxi --progress --stats --delete-during --exclude .DS_Store \
	--exclude '@eaDir/' --delete-excluded \
    --rsync-path=/usr/bin/rsync --numeric-ids \
	files:/volume1/cd/. /removable/1426-4458/cd/.

Here, my NAS is called “files” and my USB hard drive is mounted at “/removable/1426-4458”

I’d highly recommend taking the time to learn rsync and use it to perform the transfer so that you can be 100% confident that the content on your NAS is identical to what you have now.

If you have already purchased the SSD drives for your NAS,I’d suggest seeing if you can exchange them for HDDs. Using SSDs in the NAS to store your music library is a waste. You will see zero performance improvement over spinning HDDs for this use case. I suppose power consumption and noise from the NAS might be a little lower, but hopefully you don’t plan to put the NAS in your listening room, so this should not be a concern.

The big problem with using two 4 TB SSDs in the TVS-872XT is that the NAS will likely want to mirror them for its O/S. After this process completes, you’ll only have about 3.5 TB usable left for music, putting you back in the same low space situation that you’re in now. You’ll be much, much better off buying three 8 TB spinning hard disk drives. I’d suggest using two in a RAID-1 pair for the Qnap O/S and your music files. Use the third drive for weekly backups.

As far as working out capacity, here’s the equation I use to calculate storage needs:

album_count / 1800 = usable_storage_needed_in_TB

For example, if you have 10,000 CDs, ripped to FLAC, you’d need:

10000 / 1800 = 5.56 TB

This would leave the filesystem about 80% full, which is a good idea to keep things performing well. Of course, you’d probably round up to 6 TB in this case since 5.56 TB drives are not common. :slight_smile:
Again, going with 8 TB drives will give you some room to grow. You have an 8-bay NAS, so there’s plenty of expansion capacity later as well.

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Edit:

I just re-read this bit:

Hmmm, that makes the migration very tricky.

Again, there’s zero benefit to using SSDs in the NAS, so I encourage you to go with three 8 TB or larger HDDs instead. You’ll be so much happier. You’ll have redundancy, all of the performance you could ever want, and a much simpler migration.

There are dozens of things that can go wrong if you attempt to repurpose your existing SSDs as you describe. I implore you: do not do this!

Please see my note above, but I’m 80% certain that you’ll only have about 3.5 TB of usable space after the QNAP finishes installing on your two 4 TB SSDs. Perhaps QNAP owners with 2-drive setups can chime in, but this is certainly the case with Synology.

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I have more than that but I have a 4 disk nas 4 x2TB, with raid 6 and snapshots.

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You didn’t mention the existing NAS, but I suppose it does not really factor into your migration since it does not have enough “scratch” space for you to temporarily shift the 8 TB of local files from your two SSDs.

Since you are already familiar with how NASes work, I’m surprised that you are considering going with SSDs for the new one. Would love to understand your thought process.

As you know, RAID-6 “eats” two drives for parity, so you only have half of the usable storage with a 4-drive array. The same would be true of your new NAS if you use RAID-6 on the four SSDs there. You’ll be left with less usable space than you have now!

Perhaps you were thinking of not using RAID at all…just JBOD, but I’m not sure that Qnap will install without at least RAID-1 (check the manual to see). Even if it does, the Qnap OS will require some space from one of the four SSDs. You’ll have the complexity of four separate volumes to manage and balance space usage. If any one of them fails, you’ll lose ~25% of your library, minimally requiring you to restore from a backup, and you’ve not described what you are using for backups of not just the Roon database but your ~12 TB music library.

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I have not either…but a NAS is different. rotating hard disks for archival storage (which a large music library is) make a lot of sense. The access pattern for large files is sequential reads, which HDDs do very well. Where they suffer is with random I/O (eg., required for Roon’s database).

You will not experience significantly faster file access with SSDs in the Qnap. HDDs doing sequential reads can easily deliver over 200 MBps while your LAN is limited to a theoretical max of 125 MBps. You may have slightly less heat dissipation, but keep in mind that your Qnap will spin down the HDDs when not in use, so there may not be as much of a difference in heat dissipation as you would think.

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Dear David_Snyder and dear CrystalGipsySimon

Thank you very much for your very interesting contributions,
which I first have to study very carefully in order to understand them.

Enclosed is a correction on my part for better understanding:

all music file tag edits are done with Roon only, not on the original music data file and not on the backup music file.

Since the tag editing of the music albums was done with Roon,
these are certainly registered in the Roon Library / Roon Database.

Therefore already a question asked here, where is this Roon Library / Roon Database?

Can I remove the old, full internal 4 TB SSD disk and run the Roon Nucleus without it?

No more music files should be stored in the Roon Nucleus,
The Qnap server will be used for this purpose in the future.

Many thanks to you

Michael
.

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Dear all here,

Enclosed is a process flow for an upgrade of an internal HD / SSD disk, which I published here in the Roon Forum already revised.

What can I use from this process flow for outsourcing the music files to a Qnap server?

Steps for changing the smaler internal Music Drive to an larger new one:

Actual Process Step, Version from Gerald_Schrader 21 May 2019:

  1. Backup Roon database.

  2. Go to Nucleus log-out page: Log out of Nucleus (Go to Settings, General and click Logout)

  3. Shut down Nucleus from Nucleus web admin page

  4. Disconnect the Nucleus from the electric power

  5. Remove / replace internal storage SSD to an larger one.

  6. Connect the Nucleus to the electric power.

  7. Power up Nucleus from Nucleus web admin page

  8. Go to Nucleus web admin page 192.168.1.xxx: 1.-stop the server software.

  9. From Nucleus web admin page 192.168.1.xxx: format new SSD with nucleus.

  10. From Nucleus web admin page 192.168.1.xxx: 2.-stop the server software.

  11. Copy music files across the network from the storage backup location (PC) to new internal SSD in Nucleus.
    If asked for a username and password, use «Guest» for both.

  12. From Nucleus web admin page 192.168.1.xxx: restart server software.

  13. Go to Nucleus log-in page: Log in of Nucleus (Go to Settings, General and click Login)

  14. restore Roon database

Those instructions look good, most importantly:

  1. shut down from the admin web page 2
  2. physically swap the drive 1
  3. power up, initialize from the admin webpage 1, and copy your music over

Many thanks and best regards

Michael
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Alternatively, try the Roon Knowledge base.

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Dear All,

to the SSD’s,
at the moment I have one 8 TB SSD and two 4 TB SSD’s
which I would like to use in the Qnap server,
HDD’s I have none.

The Qnap operating system will be on a separate intern 1TB SSD latch memory, so that the music files are on externally removable disks in the Qnap.

I would leave the data base on the Roon Nucleus in any case and only back it up on the Qnap, on a separate intern 1TB SSD latch storage, as a backup.
As far as I understand it here, it is located on the internal 128 GB SSD memory latch of the Roon Nucleus,
is that right?.

OK,
if my network is the bottleneck and cannot transfer 10 Gbps of data to the Roon Nucleus, connection problems may occur,
I have understood that so far.

Can the Qnap, via USB-C to USB-A 3.0 cable connection, deliver the music data / music files to the Roon Nucleus?

Or formulated the other way round,

can the Roon Nucleus, via USB-A to USB-C 3.0 cable connection, get the music data / music files from Qnap?

My goal is,
to run the Roon Nucleus without the music files with the server Qnap with the music files for the purpose of memory expansion.

How can this be realised in your opinion?

Many thanks and best regards

Michael
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The Roon database is on the boot NVMe drive of your Nucleus. This may be what you refer to as the “128 GB latch drive”. The database is not stored on the same drives that hold your music files.

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Yes. But the music on that drive would be inexcusable unless you install it into a USB case and update the location in Roon’s Storage Settings.

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Steps 1 through 4 plus the “Remove” part of 5 are relevant.

Again, the migration is needlessly complicated by attempting to reuse the 4 TB SSDs in the Qnap.

Instead, place both in external USB cases and attach them to the Qnap via USB. Load the Qnap with several 8 TB (or larger) hard disk drives (not SSDs). Once Qnap is installed and configured with some sort of RAID, create a new share for your music library.

Next, use the rsync command (as I described earlier) to make an exact copy of your music files to the shared folder in the Qnap. Sync the content of each SSD to a different folder so that you can update the location of each in Roon.

Use your old SSDs for backups or some other project. They do not belong in the NAS.