I am on Roon for a few years now, always on Synology. I was starting to have more and more difficulty with my Synology implementation of Roon because the Synology app was a third party one and the integration with Synology often got broken when either Synology or Roon had new releases. In addition, even though I had replaced the Roon database disk with SSD, performance was very poor.
As an example, when I recently had to reinstall the entire Roon DB and import all music on the Synology (long storyâŚ) it took for ever. 48 hours later I was at import of 30,000 tracks with 15,000 to go. This was WITHOUT analyze. Analyze with 3 cores was running at about 500 tracks per hour!
I tried moving to a Windows Core, but that was not only slow, it was also unstable, with the Roon app crashing every so often.
I figured that Roon doesnât work well in shared environments, and so I had a choice between the Nucleus and a ROCK. I was quite far along in discussions with my dealer for the base Nucleus (India Price ~$2000), at which time I thought to see what ROCK was all about. It had always been my impression that the NUC Build involved deep tech (as in soldering etc.). However I was quite delighted to see that the NUC came pre-assembled and the only thing to do was to follow the ROCK install, which also seemed pretty trivial. Best of all, an i7 NUC with 16GB was a quarter of the price of the base Nucleus!
Promptly bought an i7 NUC with 16GB (over specified, but not much gap in price). Took all of 15 minutes to install and set up Roon. Since my previous installation (on Synology followed by the Windows attempt) were both floundering anyway, I decided to go for a clean import of my music files.
By way of stats, 45,000 music files were imported in about 45 hours (1000/hr) with Analysis turned off. After the music was imported I took a backup and set about analyzing with 6 cores. Very fast! At 8000 tracks an hour it took hardly 6 hours to complete.
My logitech extension remains on Docker in Synology and works like a charm. The UI responsiveness is awesome. Album Art pops up instantly and searches, playback etc. are insanely fast relative to what I had gotten used to with Synology.
While evaluating ROCK/Nucleus/Synology (which I did even when I first installed) I searched for and could find no post on comparative performance. Had some stats been there possibly I would have gone for a ROCK a while ago. I wonder if anyone has done an apples to apples comparison with an identical music database, with various platforms such as Synology, QNAP, Windows, Linus, ROCK and Nucleus 1/2. That would be of great value to people getting on board.
I thought to share my experience here for the benefit of people going through a decision making process to select a platform.