Roon Nucleus verses Apple Mac Mini M1

Thanks for the input. I’ve been getting on there once a week manually to check for and install updates (such as OS 11.1) but if Automatic Updates work for you, I’ll give it a try.

I have a dedicated headless 2012 MM for running the Roon Server, and the only optimization that I have is to disable Spotlight. I am not running anything else except the Roon Server, the rest are MacOS system processes.

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I just pulled the trigger on a 2014 i7 Mac mini with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB PCI-Express SSD. I was really torn between that and a new M1, but I decided I didn’t want SSDs hanging off the back and I’m not paying $$$ for Apple’s storage markup. It only ended up being $650 as opposed to almost $900. With this I’ve got both the PCI-E slot and the SATA slot to mess around with so internal storage won’t ever be a problem for me. I picked up a Blue Jeans Cat-6A cable for it too. It’s going to be nice to not have to run Core off my MacBook Pro anymore.

Hopefully Apple releases new iPad Minis this year so I can pick one up for use as a remote.

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People make things so complicated or they show their biases toward manufacturers. Apple screen sharing has been around for 15 years (?) and works much easier than any Remote Desktop app. The new M1 macs blow intel computers out of the water as for speed, doesn’t matter what OS your running nor does it matter if your running thru Rosetta. I’ve been a Mac/Unix/linux guy for over 40 years and in my testing, Roon doesn’t run any different or sound any different using a new or used Mac mini, or on linux or on a nucleus. I have friends that bought the nucleus or other server boxes because they don’t know or don’t want to be bothered with a computer. For the rest of us, it’s a machine running an application on it.
All of the current music servers for sale and being reviewed in the rags have all of this memory and a bunch of cores to run an app that reads and distributes music files. Why? 1 fast processor and 16G of ram is all you need.
People talk about running on a slimmed down version of Windows which is still way bloated than the other OS’s.
There are no issues running an m1 Mac with Roon, I’ve setup multiple friends with the m1 with no such issues. Just maybe there were a couple of bugs in the very initial release of the m1, but those are usually cleared up in a short time.
I’ve done testing using Roon on different OS’s and none of the machines running different OS’s taxes the hardware much. On an older Mac mini with 16GB ram, with over a 140k tracks under Roon, streaming to multiple endpoints, the system is 10-15% busy, similar stats running Roon on linux. (All servers use an ssd for the boot drive). So why would you ever need a supercomputer type of machine to run Roon? You wouldn’t. I also don’t use usb, I use Ethernet to go to my dac, so my computer is isolated outside of the listening room. An SSD running the OS and Roon executables are a necessity especially for handling a large number of tracks. The ripped music files can reside on an attached hard drive.

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I’ve been watching the system and RAM usage on my 2014 Mac Mini since getting it last month and it barely even acknowledges that it’s running Roon with 2TB worth of music to keep tabs on. Best decision I ever made. Now I just need to throw a second internal SSD into it and it’ll be perfect.

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You really don’t need to use SSD’s for your music files. It’s much more important to run the Roon app on an ssd so it will have its index on the ssd. The size of the library isn’t a concern but the # of songs is. If you have TB’s of music, a raid 5 storage configuration would be beneficial since a music system is a write once and read many times setup. Also with a Mac mini, I make sure all overhead apps like time machine are only active when I’m not listening to music.

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RAID is for high availability. As long as your have real backups of your music library, RAID5 is not going to buy you anything other than headaches. Just buy a drive large enough to store your whole library. Then buy a couple more for backups…one kept at some other site.

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Sorry for replying to such an old post - but, well, is a few months now and I understand Linux has been made to boot on the Mac Mini M1. So I am curious if our friend at Roon Labs - or some of you fine, advance users peeps, have been able to

  1. First, run the Roon Bridge natively on Linux on the Mac Mini M1? - From what I understand it should be able to run the armv8 version on it, natively.

  2. Again, since Linux has been ported, is there some testing going running the Roon Core on it? Should we hope for it ?

  3. Last, well, all the above while not impossible, it might me a stretch. The most simple situation and most likely is that, as per the reviews and evaluations, the M1 is so powerful that should blow any NUC, the Nucleus and the Nucleus Plus out of the water, even on emulation mode. The key word is… “should”. Any intrepid users… Does it? :smiley:

[ EDIT: AH - I jumped the gun on my comment No. 3 - indeed a few people tried and they seem to have been successful except for 1 - from the description is a very complex system, so it looks like it should be no issue running the general common case ]
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With the cost of storage ever decreasing, I’m not concerned about SSD vs HDD. Less moving parts = less failure, and as long as I have a backup, I’m fine. I don’t hoard ungodly amounts of music like some people, so four to five thousand albums are more than enough for me.

Speed_racer, I agree with you, and that is what I do. I mentioned raid 5 because I would do this instead of buying bigger or more ssd drives for a music library. 1 of the reasons people buy ssd’s is because of the perceived increase of reliability, and it would be cheaper in the long run for a raid 5 hard disk setup than using individual ssd’s.
I better quantify my statement of ‘perceived increase of liability’. Everything overtime can/will fail, that’s why you always have 1 or 2 backups being executed on a regular basis. 99.999% of audiophiles/consumers buy the cheapest ‘consumer’ level ssd’s because of cost. For a write once/read many Roon setup, consumer ssd’s would be fine. But when using consumer ssd’s for caching/indexing/constantly changing data environments, these ssd’s will probably fail sooner and/or start slowing down compared to a hard drive. There are huge differences between an enterprise grade ssd and a consumer grade ssd.

If a person doesn’t have a backup drive, that’s on them. Like you said, everything is going to fail eventually, but most people upgrade their setups long before then. This (HDD vs. SSD failure rates) really isn’t something anyone here will need to worry about. You can argue hypotheticals all you want, but it’s really not necessary.

Ok, so you prefer Linux over Apple. I do to in a large enterprise environment. We are talking about a simple process here, running an app for music playback. But your comment about it’s hard to run 3rd party OS’s on a Mac is simply not true. I’ve ran multiple Linux OS’s on a Mac concurrently and it’s very easy to do. I’ve used parallels, fusionvm, and virtualbox on a Mac for over a decade with no issues and it’s very simple to install Linux. If an application needed all of the computer resources (ram and cpu), then sure, you can make a case for a nuc, but since Roon or any other music app that I have used doesn’t take much of the computer resources, and you favor Linux, then run the app in a Linux virtual machine under OS X.
Since you want to run Linux on a nuc, how are you going to backup and restore data residing on the nuc? How are you going to add future disk drives to the nuc? You can do this if you know Linux but for most audiophiles, they can’t and that’s where the simplicity of using OS X comes in

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Running a virtualised OS is not what was meant but rather running Linux natively on the Mac. It is entirely doable, but more than your average Mac user would likely be capable of doing.

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I know, but if you noticed in my thread, since you have more than enough computer resources, why not make it simpler and use a Linux VM?

How does one set up Time Machine so it will not run when you are listening to music? Or do you turn off Time Machine manually?

I don’t personally use Time Machine, but I think you can just tell it when to perform the backups.

Time machine backs up every hour if you want it to or not. Download timemachineeditor and schedule when you want time machine to perform the backups, then go into time machine and turn off automatic backups. I backup everyday at 3am. The next day after scheduling the backup, go into time machine to make sure it backed up

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So ask your typical audiophile what SMB stands for? Did I ever say to use time machine to backup Roon? Roon has its own backup procedure that you should setup. And yes, time machine will backup the Roon backups unless you tell it to ignore those files.
Mac mini has 4 usb/thunderbolt ports depending on model. Do you think 4 ports are enough? I don’t. If you outgrow your current storage, do you add another drive or do you buy a new larger drive? With Roon, you can just add another drive instead of the hassle of migrating to a larger drive. I use an OWC thunderbolt dock so I can hook up all my devices without sacrificing speed. Your typical 4 port powered or non-powered hubs are useless.

You can go into set up and schedule TM to run when ever you want it to. I have a SSD and a HDD in my 2012 MAC Mini (and I only schedule the TM to run @ 2:00 AM into my HDD). My SSD is dedicated to Roon only! Simply love how it works! Then I use a M1 Mini in my office for Roon Core where I store my Roon Convolutions for Room Correction!

Or Windows.