Um, yes you can.
Cheers Geoff. I stand corrected! 
However, they’re aren’t many 2.5” 7mm & 9mm drives that I can find? Most of the drives that size seem to be SSD’s.
I was just suggesting a temporary test using an existing internal hard drive of any sort - use another machine that has an internal HDD if you have one. The iMac would suffice as well. This isn’t about sound quality, it is just about confirming the problem before spending on the solution.
I’d just buy an external SSD. But if the OP has budget limitations, best to be sure of the cause before buying the fix. Part of my caution here is that once the drive is spun up, even a spinning HDD, there should not be a big lag in indexing through tracks or skipping tracks. That doesn’t sound like a drive sleep issue, although it could be an overloaded USB connection I guess. But then an external USB SSD wouldn’t help. Obviously an internal SSD should.
most 2.5" SATA drives will fit in a RevA Nucleus (only the 15mm wont fit)
in RevB Nucleus, all 2.5" SATA drives will fit (including 15mm)
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I’m kind of confused now lol.
I don’t have an internal SSD to test this out on. But if I’m understanding, I could use my iMac? Not sure how to connect it though? Just usb to nucleus usb and point roon to it? Make a folder of Flacs for testing it out?
I appreciate all the feedback.
i am confused too… he might be suggesting using the external drive w/ a mac or something… unsure how that fixes the issue
Maybe I don’t understand your configuration. I thought you had a Nucleus as a Roon Core and an iMac Pro as an endpoint. Then you just move a couple of albums to the iMac pro’s internal HDD, no matter what type it is. Then deactivate the storage on your external USB (or just unplug it). Then play tracks from the internal HDD on the iMac through Roon. See if that performs differently.
That could create other issues (network congestion with the data traveling iMac->Nucleus->iMac but it should give you the opportunity to validate that the problem is a “slow drive” of some sort.
In my experience having an external USB drive is not in itself a bad idea.
So something is wrong.
It may go to sleep as you suggest — easy to test by accessing two albums right after one another, if the first is slow, is the second too?
You said you have a 4 TB drive, do you need that?
A new 4 TB USB 3.0 drive is about $100, you could test with that, no need to go for a complex and expensive solution.
Ok cool I will try that. Makes sense now lol. Thanks!
Hi. Yes my current files are over 2 tb so 4 would make sense. Track to track off an album goes fine once it starts playing but skipping tracks and skimming tracks does not.
This is where I start to wonder if it is just a drive sleep problem, unless you have a very slow, obsolete USB hard drive (one that large shouldn’t be - too modern) or you have a problem with the USB port being congested somehow.
In other words, if the USB drive is awake and spinning, I do not think that scanning through a track or skipping tracks should be a problem.
Just in case - to what machine is the USB drive attached? To the nucleus or to the iMac? Do you have any other devices plugged into the USB of that same machine?
And your network is all wired, right?
Very odd, it wouldn’t go to sleep so quickly that you couldn’t skip tracks.
And it’s USB 3.1 which is plenty fast.
And I don’t see how it could be broken in a way that plays well normally but misbehaves in some cases.
Actually, I just thought of one idea: if the drive has some kind of fault that causes a lot of read errors that require repeated reads until it gets it right, it is conceivable that it would have time to do the re-reads during normal playback (because the drive is much faster than what music playback requires), but when you jump to a new location it may have to read several times. Pretty unlikely, but I can’t think of anything else.
@danny drives report read failure rates, does the Nucleus record that? Actually, that probably doesn’t work over USB, does it?
Yes network is all wired. USB drive directly to Nucleus, nothing else in or out of USB. Wonder if I should just unplug the usb from nucleus and hook it up to my iMac and maybe run disc utility on it? And also see if Roon runs better w/out Nucleus? But I would have to make the iMac my core then right?
Yeah. See my comment above about hooking it up to my iMac and running disc utility?
Yes, run the disk utility.
I don’t know Mac, don’t know what it will tell you, but worth a test.
I have an external USB drive attached to a ROCK. If I am playing a track from the USB drive skipping forward in a song is nearly instantaneous for me.
Worth a try. Some folks have quality degradation when core is also endpoint, but this is for troubleshooting and not the permanent configuration.
USB driver issue on core?
Point being, these symptoms don’t feel like “drive sleep” alone. USB drives are generally plenty fast enough to index through tracks or skip them quickly once they are awake.
15 posts were split to a new topic: Moving files from external to internal storage and keeping edits