Steps to Upgrade Internal Storage Drive in Nucleus

FWIW The included bracket didn’t line up with my WD Blue 1TB SSD. I had to leave out the 2 screws closest to the connector.

It’s not a huge deal but that is strange. Send me model #? Those holes are really standard (or should be)!

WDS100T2B0A - Image attached. Drive holes could be slotted to fix this or spacers could be used under the bracket. It was close, but would put too much pressure on the connector otherwise.

Jason, in the picture it looks like that hole is very close to lining up. Forgive me if you’ve already done this, but have you tried attaching the bracket to the drive first, before screwing the bracket into the Nucleus with the silver screws?

When I swapped my SSD recently I found that if I set the bracket and the drive both down flat on a table top, the holes for the black screws didn’t align perfectly in the vertical direction - I had to lift the SSD up off the table very slightly to get the holes to align. Everything went smoothly after that.

Agreed. On each side, 1 hole should be round, the other slotted. We plan on doing this in a future revision.

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Danny, I have completed my SSD swap, replacing the 2TB with a 4TB. Physically there were no issues swapping the drives - I had that done in about half an hour. There were a couple unexpected things I ran across in the subsequent process however:

  1. The step by step procedure I put together needs to be modified to include another “stop server software” step after formatting the drive because the server software automatically starts up after formatting the drive.

  2. Restoring the backup went ok (took a long time!) but after I was finally able to get into Roon again, I noticed a spinning activity icon in the upper right corner of the screen. I first checked Settings, Library, to make sure it wasn’t doing Background Audio Analysis (it wasn’t). I then clicked on the activity icon and got a message that said:

“Adding music to library: Complete. Nucleus Internal Storage - Scanning now…32899 Tracks Imported, 21191 Files Scanned”

I let it sit for 10 hours and absolutely nothing changed, so I restarted the server software. The activity icon appeared briefly, then went away. I checked Settings, Library, and found that the Nucleus was now doing Background Audio Analysis on 304 tracks. After it finished that task, everything seems to be back to normal. I did however find 13 tracks that needed to be deleted in Library Maintenance.

Any idea what happened to me with those various issues?

I tried that, but it puts too much pressure on the connector if you try to tighten the silver screws. So you can either delete two black screws or put washers under the silver screws, but the silver screws aren’t very long.

Interesting. I wonder if your SSD is not made to the standard 2.5" drive configuration? On both of my Samsung 860 EVO drives, I attached the rails to the drive first, placed the drive flat on the drive mounting platform, and slid the drive into the connector. Everything fit perfectly and tightening the silver screws was not an issue as the rail was already flush against the platform.

Something that I wonder about though is that my Nucleus has a thick sheet of clear plastic covering the platform where the SSD sits. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be some kind of insulation, or to act as a spacer. Does your Nucleus have this plastic sheet? If it doesn’t, I can understand the problems you’re having with not being able to tighten the silver screw without stressing the connector.

Here’s a picture of the SSD mounting area in my Nucleus showing the plastic sheet:

We added this early in the Nucleus build runs when we found some drives had exposed circuit boards that extended past the edge of the drive itself. This sheet prevents any short circuits.

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I suspected that was the purpose when I initially opened my Nucleus. I’ll have to say though that it is slightly confusing that the official drive installation page (https://kb.roonlabs.com/Installing_Nucleus_Internal_Storage) does not show this insulator. I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be there or not after not seeing it in the kb procedures.

Unfortunately, I made that document with the very first Nucleus ever made.

Mine is new, and has the sheet. Thank you both for the follow-up.

Jason, re-reading everything I guess your problem is actually alignment in the vertical direction, not the horizontal direction? I was originally thinking you couldn’t get all the screws into the drive because the holes didn’t match up horizontally, but that’s not the case? If I understand your situation correctly, what you would need is for the hole closest to the connector to be slotted in the vertical direction to allow alignment of the drive with the connector?

Correct. It is a vertical issue.

I used to use a QNAP NAS for my storage networked to a Roon Nucleus Plus. It backed up to a USB HDD connected to my laptop as well as to a cloud service. A couple of days ago I plugged this backup HDD into the Nucleus to compare the sonic performance and it was clearly superior in terms of detail, dynamics, clarity, timing and quite simply involvement. Suffice it to say the QNAP will now either be relegated to backup duties or sold off…

That is extremely interesting. Anyone else experience this?

I can’t say I hear a difference. I still have my Synology NAS on the network, but the library was disabled. When I put the NAS in play against the SSD in my Nuc I really don’t think I could tell a difference using Jeff Tweedy’s solo album (24/96).
But then again, I couldn’t tell the difference between these 24-bit FLACs and the MQA version on Tidal. So I may have bad ears too. Expensive ears, but just not up to par.

NAS setups are built to a price point like everything else. In our HIFI hobby such build restrictions are perhaps to the detriment of quality audio. Like many my ears have seen (heard) better days…and I know they are on a downward spiral in terms of response curves, etc. I now try to compensate with better setups for power and noise floor impacts…we at least as best I can. While I can’t maybe hear much difference it does make me feel a little better knowing I have taken fewer shortcuts in terms of quality.

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I think it obviously depends on the system, music, room - all the usual stuff - how apparent the difference would be, but I listened to a wide range while doing the comparison. I could hear the difference even on poorly-recorded material like Motörhead’s Overkill, never mind well-recorded classical and jazz - and I’m sixty, have ridden motorbikes since my teens and been to more noisy gigs than I have remaining brain cells to remember, so my ears are definitely not at their best…

I’m tempted to try with an internal SSD, though I’ve been working on the premise that the drive being outside the Nucleus case is contributing to the superior performance.

I’ll definitely be getting a good power supply to see if that lifts things further, though probably not for the NAS as well…

I am glad you posted this. From all that I can tell, what people are saying is that the best sound quality is obtained with an internal SSD, followed by ethernet/NAS, followed by USB SSD. Is this about Correct?

If it is, I can live with that and move my hi-res files from my computer to the internal drive by drag and drop. That is, copy the new files as they come in from my iMac which is storing them to the internal SSD on the Nucleus + Also correct?

This is reasonable protection since the files are now on two different systems on two different storage media. I also use TimeMachine which is not really backup but it would do in a pinch where the Nucleus + internal disk, and the external SSD on the iMac that has my music both fail at the same time. If the USB TimeMachine disk also connected to the iMac fail at the same time, it is a risk - could happen with a strange power surge. I may have to address that :slight_smile:

One last question. Could I have the nucleus start an automatic copy of new files on an iMac folder. I am aware of the watch function, but this is more.