Finally pulled the trigger on a NUC7i5BNH and the 8 GB of RAM recommended on Roon KB.
With the very kind help of @Rugby here, I should be able to put it together.
However, the recommended SSD is no longer in stock at Amazon (USA):
Any replacements I can buy now?
Thanks!
Samsung 960 NVME M.2 250GB is working on my NUC7i7BNH - that was the smallest and fastest one I could find readily. Not cheap so whacks up the price a lot…but instant gratification is wonderful motivator 
The extra space will never use on ROCK…unless I do database backs hourly for months hahahaha
960 GB?? That is a lot of money and unnecessary for ROCK OS. I was looking for an SSD for the OS. Music is already in a NAS. Sorry if I was not clear.
OOPS 250GB brain not engaged before fingers - you could probably find a cheaper smaller one but have to wait for stock
I went with an Intel 600p 128GB M.2. Works fine.
And both of these are compatible, right?
So as long as it says M.2 SSD, it should be fine?
Any M.2 SSD should be fine, but note that NVMe SSDs have much faster random read/write performance than SATA SSDs (both can be in the M.2 form factor). The former will be much more responsive in handling the Roon library database.
The SSD storage capacity is a non-issue for a Roon database. However, the larger SSDs tend to have more sophisticated controller chips and are faster in performance benchmarks. I’m not really sure you would notice the difference in practice, so the large capacity drives are almost certainly not worth the extra cost. Caveat: I have not compared them myself.
Thanks.
So “key word” search is “SSD M.2 NVMe”? I am learning…
This ones?
Yup - that’s the one I have. It works.
The Samsung 960 EVO is actually far too high for a budget nvme drive, both in terms of performance and price. Yes, it’s a relatively attractive nvme drive, but compared to the 600p still quite expensive. The hole with the 960 Pro is about ten cents per gigabyte, and the performance difference justifies that barely.
This makes the choice between the 600p and the 960 EVO quite simple. Choose the first to get a drive faster than a sata disk, but hardly anymore. For daily activities, the 600p is more than fast enough, but keep in mind that all data must be cached: if you drive this drive well, you may experience some dips in performance.
The EVO will buy you if you want a seriously fast nvme drive without spending the money normally. As far as performance is concerned, the EVO is significantly faster than the 600p and is close to the 960 Pro. However, the latter remains the drive you need to choose if you want the fastest of this moment.
Translated via Google Translate from a review at Tweakers.net
I also wanted something that could be redeployed as perhaps a windows installion at a later date so took the storage hit now. While the NUC7i7BNH is probably overkill for ROCK in my setup it’s seems little delta to max it out for whatever I might want to throw at it.
In Singapore the smallest M2 drive I could get was 250gb without ordering from overseas with a long delay.
I am having a hard time understanding what this means…
If you’ve got a huge library, get something from the premium-priced Samsung 960 EVO line. If you’re an ordinary mortal, like me, the Intel 600p is perfectly satisfactory.
I opted for the Intel 600p 128 GB. I paid less than the quoted Amazon price, around $65 at Newegg in late May.
AJ
I paid 130 euro for a Samsung 960 EVO 250GB
My library is about 12,000 tracks. Not likely to grow too much now, as I am using Tidal Hi-Fi
Roon does not distinguish local tracks from Tidal tracks when they are added to your library. The Tidal tracks don’t take up media storage space (local media cannot be on the ROCK m.2 SSD anyway), but Tidal albums add to the Roon Library database burden the same as local media.
You may find your Roon library grows faster adding Tidal albums than buying content since adding Tidal albums is “free” (aside from the flat monthly cost, of course).