Hi @Max_Hudini, I agree that the drives are pretty good for music but your post raises a good point.
This is likely true for the most part, reading an entire hi-res track from a conventional HDD is more than quick enough for Roon. SSDs have the advantage of being almost silent in operation (they do make a noise, if you “thrash one” and put your ear to it) compared to platter HDDs.
The factors influencing performance with a large library are:
RAM available to the core, 8GB becomes inadequate, 16 is better and 32 is still affordable; and
speed and quality of the drive on which the library DB is located, ideally this should be a quick M2 with adequate capacity.
Faster drives for audio files are unlikely to improve Roon performance.
There are NAS-specific SSDs on the market.
How much does it matter for NUC, Nucleus or Music Streamers/Players???
Which one will You choose between…?
1 Samsung 870 EVO (QVO)
2. WD Red SA500
3. Seagate Ironwolf 125
So in theory the NAS ready models are optimised, think lower power, improved reliability and the like. In practice, it probably made more sense for mechanical HDDs and this is just a bit of market-making. Given data reads and writes to a Roon music storage devices are pretty low volume I don’t think it matters.
Regarding which I’d choose. Speaking personally I’d not touch anything made by Seagate ever again. Either I’ve gotten ridiculously unlucky with their devices but in my experience, these go wrong, and other brands (reputable) don’t. YMMV. Samsung has been a/the leading name in flash memory storage for PCs for a while now, I’ve not had an SSD fail on me yet. Performance and reliability are still close to class-leading although some of the other manufacturers are a lot closer now than 5 years ago.
Well, QVO drives should only be used for storage. The WD RED can be repurposed as an OS drive. Like killdozer, have been burned by Seagate in the past and biased against them, so the Ironwolf would never even make it onto any shortlist.
I have a bunch (75 disk setup) of both WD Red Pro and IronWolf Pro (+ now lately Seagate Exos x16 + x18). I see no big difference in failure rate between the two brands.
Edit:
Reason for introducing Exos x16 disks, they have lately been sold at close to half price of similar models from both Seagate and WD.
Last quarter, we reported on the state of our 14TB Seagate drives (model: ST14000NM0138) provisioned in Dell storage servers. They were failing at a higher than expected rate and everyone—Backblaze, Seagate, and Dell—wanted to know why. The failed drives were examined by fault analysis specialists and in late Q3 it was decided as a first step to upgrade the firmware for that cohort of drives still in service. The results were that the quarterly failure rate dropped from 6.29% in Q3 to 4.66% in Q4, stabilizing the rapid rise in failures we’d seen in Q2 and Q3.