In an effort to proactively mitigate storage troubles i changed local storage in my headless Windows 11 Roon Server. My plan was to replace the 10Tb WD Red (EFAX) with a 12Tb Toshiba N300. The 12Tb drive was first placed in an external powered USB cabinet, and the media (around 9Tb) was copied. I chose to format the 12Tb with exFAT, whereas the 10Tb WD Red was NTFS. So, when all was said and done (including a backup of the RoonDB) i switched the drives and made sure they had the same drive letter assignment. While the old drive is a 5400rpm drive and the newer one is 7200rpm, i expected a slight increase in read/write performance. But, under Roon, both the initial drive search (after startup) and the analysis of a part of the media library is freakin' slow... For some reason some 30K tracks (of the total 200K) aren't considered identical, and Roon wants them reanalysed. I have 3 CPU Cores assigned and it is glacial... It has done about 4.500 tracks by now (in 18-20h), and with this pace it'll take two weeks or so... I'm on the current Roon (b.1517) and latest Win 11 (24H2).
Would i benefit from reformatting the 12Tb to NTFS and clone the media again? Or is this slowness due to Roon current build?
The hardware is decent, 16Gb DDR4, Intel Core i5-11400 on a Intel 590 chipset with the system and Roon DB on a Samsung Pro 980 m.2 NVMe.
I haven’t done an analysis of your two drives yet, but my experience has told me that larger, faster RPM drives can be slower for many purposes, often due to physical block sizes on the physical drive layer that you can’t do much about. When drives get this large, it pays to look at all sorts of factors about their intended purpose. Sometimes they are really best for one particular purpose like random read/writes for a variety of large or small files, depending upon your workflow. I have larger Western Digital red 7200 RPM hard drives in one of my NASs, and that NAS (same model) is quite a bit slower than the ones with smaller Western Digital red 5400 RPM drives I have in my other NASs. I am not saying that this is a definitive conclusion for you, however!
Thanks for the feedback, just what i was looking for!
I realise they are different in some ways, and still pretty much similar in size.
I’d also like if someone using a similar setup (single SATA internal storage) could tell whether they see performance changes with these latest builds of Roon.
But what i’m seeing might as well be down to finding the optimum settings for analysis. I have set the analysis to “Fast (2 Cores)” now, and this seem to gel better with less congested access times for the drive, and i also got a bit more healthy CPU usage on the server.
It has actually chewed away quite briskly these latest hours, and it’s up to 9K tracks right now.
It chewed through the remaining nearly 22K tracks through the night, so this morning it was ready.
I have seen quite substantial speed improvements a few releases back, but this experience pointed in the other direction?!
I don’t know what might affect this, but it seems to be a bit unreliable right now…
Thank you for your post. The most recent build didn’t contain any substantial changes to analysis or indexing but there are always overlapping factors that can change performance with each new build.
What specifically would you like support to investigate in this case? If you’ve only reformatted storage without fully resetting your database in the last few weeks, then the log files containing analysis before/after will likely still be available for a raw A/B comparison.
Hi Connor, since the performance seemed to be way off since my last major rebuild of the Roon Core, i figured something might have changed.
Roon Server seem to behave a bit different regarding performance from build to build the last couple of years, which might be down to increased complexity or whatever.
Anyways, i found a sweetspot for quicker analysis by finding the optimal CPU Core assignment in my setup.
It was a shout out to see whether other advanced users seen similar, basically.
AFAIK this is one of the WD models initially being labelled as 5400rpm but they were actually 7200rpm internally. Later they got renamed to WD Plus with official 7200rpm. If you make sure to have a CMR model (not SMR), they are actually pretty fast.
Would assume the rpm have nothing to do with your problem.
