All depends on your library size.
I tried OS X with Apple PCIe 512 SSD - didn’t work on very large library for me.
Now super happy with Intel Skull Canyon - running Roonserver headless on Win 10 for two weeks without any issues.
I’m not bothered with the fan noise, as it is server for me. I don’t put it in the music listening room, but have it general TV room in closed cupboard, to feed two casual listening zones in realively noisy environment. So while fan some noise is there, it is OK.
Just ordered 2nd Samsung 950 Pro 512 PCIe SSD to create RAID 0 to speed up search.
Even if fan noise becomes a problem there is a solution. I bought a fanless case for my 2 NUC’s. Both cases are Akasa (http://www.akasa.com.tw). I have an 5th Gen i5 running Win 10 with Roon Server headless with Fidelizer and an i7 running (Win 10 as well) everything else (PLEX, DVDFab, Roon, etc). I have an SSD in both NUC’s and all the media (music and video) on a NAS in another room. Silence, golden silence. I can highly recommend the Akasa NUC cases.
It also depend on the cpu. An i5 or Xeon will run pretty well anything Roon. If you are looking at an older Mac Mini or MacBook, you might have issues.
I’m targeting to increase read speed from ~2500 to ~3500 MB/s - it will be limited by DMI 3.0 performance.
Let’s see how Intel NUC6i7KYK NUC will perform.
Reason for this experiment is realively slow search in Roon taking 5 - 30 sec depending on case. The bottleneck is library reading from SSD, as CPU and RAM utilization is only 15-30% with max load I could create.
I hope Roon team is working on further optimization of search engine while users are doing experiments on HW.
Understatement of the year. I cannot for the life of me fathom how one accumulates that much music. Until I read his posts I thought I had an illness, I’ve since realized I have mere symptoms.
Work in media (radio, music magazines), DJ, studio or distributor, inherit a collection, purchase a lot… All very legit reasons to end up with a large library. Other less legit options exist as well I am lead to believe.
You mean, something like this? Admittedly, it’s running Roon Essentials, rather than full Roon, and it is limited to 15,000 tracks, but it’s along the lines of what you were asking for, I think.
Actually. I was thinking more alone the lines of a Roon branded device, that comes with Roon core and ready to go.
So it would be branded Roon, and pretty much only run Roon
But thanks though
There are going to be Roon Core only devices out there (in pretty cases), and we plan to open up the operating system (Roon OS) in case you want to DIY the machine yourself.
We don’t want to sell Roon branded hardware because:
building a hardware business is very different to a software business, and we tried that 10 years ago with Sooloos… we’d like to stick to software with Roon
we have more than enough partners who are willing to build great hardware
we wouldn’t want to compete with our partners
That said, partnerships come and go, and some are better than others. Also, some partners build products we love and some build products that we accept. When we see hardware we love, you will see us actively pushing it. We might start to be vocal about that on our website some day…
