I’ve ordered a new Synology 923+ and will be using all the upgrades. The M2 slots will have two official Synology cards installed. I have 5g internet and cat8 wiring, so I’ll be using a 10G network card. I’ll max out RAM at 64g, and the 4 hdd slots will each hold 14TB Iron Wolf drives in RAID 10. I will load the Roon database on the M2 SSD, and my nearly 300,000 track music library on the RAID array. I will also use the RAID array for documents, photos, and videos. I have a separate Synology NAS for backups of everything.
I know that there have been discouraging warnings about using a NAS as a Roon server, but this just seems like a perfect solution for me. Any advice? Wish me luck.
The warning concerns mainly older generations of NAS with low-end CPUs. If the CPU in a NAS is comparable to a recommended one, there’s no reason why it wouldn’t work - and a NAS has other advantages, too.
The AMD in the 923+ is still no speed demon, though, and you have a library that Roon considers as „very large“ and requiring a very-high spec system.
This is how the AMD compares to NUC10 (which isn’t the fastest NUC around) in single thread speed:
Is it? I’m not a Synology expert but according to the Synology website it has an AMD Ryzen V1500B, which seems to be slower in single core performance?
It’s a shame Synology and others continue to eke out the last drop from these ultra low end processors. I’m running DSM7 on an Intel i7-2600 (circa 2011) with 16GB ram using only the embedded SATA controller, 3 ports for 16TB drives Raid 5, plus a 256GB ancient SATA SSD for read-only cache. Everything but the 16TB drives were parts from a decade ago!
Roon absolutely screams on it compared to i7-6700 from 2015 running Windows 11 on SATA SSD. Go figure. Linux makes all the difference me thinks. Though I’ve run ROCK on the same hardware and it wasn’t perfect.
In both cases my library is only 110,000 tracks. Roon DB consumes 6GB ram and is speedy. Startup storage scans are quite fast too with the 3 spindles supplying decent read performance. Not sure how much the read-only cache SSD helps but can’t hurt. I’ve read bad stories about Synology managing read-write SSD caches so I chose to avoid it despite having a 2nd old SSD drive.
Sounds like the 923+ is on the way so you’ll have to let us know. PM me if you’d like to know how to run DSM7 on non-synology hardware and I’ll point you in the right direction.
I should note: I use PCM upsampling, 7 bands of PEQ and crossfeed typically with my headphone setup. <1% cpu utilization is normal for Roon process. I typically see Roon processing speed reported about 40x for zones I use the DSP functions.
I am running Roon on a DS1522+ which seems to be the same as your 923+ as far as the computing power goes. With a smaller library than yours, it runs perfectly fine. It would be interesting to see how it works with your 300000 tracks, I might get there eventually…
For what it’s worth, deoending on access patterns of your other apps, maybe you do not even need to dedicate an SSD for Roon database. Configure them as cache, and most likely all of Roon’s database will stay on the SSD anyway, but you have fewer volumes to manage, and cache can be used to accelerate other things, too.
I was wondering about that too. I have 2 x 400 gb m2 ssds. Would it make any sense to go even bigger on the cache? (Don’t need more for a drive on which to put the database.)
How active do you expect your NAS to be? 400GB of read-write cache is significant unless you’re moving many hundreds of GB regularly like a corporate network situation. The system also caches in available RAM.
I’ve read about problems on Synology and its ability to properly manage the cache. Not a problem with read-only but enabling writes adds the potential for data loss if the cache isn’t flushed properly at shutdown, etc. which apparently DSM hasn’t always handled properly resulting in corruption and/or out right data loss.
I have smaller sticks, and get pretty much 100% cache hit ratio. As far as I can see, all of the Roon’s database is cacged, as well as BTRFS is pinnrd, and there’s enough room for whatever files are accessed at random (streamed files don’t need to be cached and aren’t). If you already have 400GB 9nes,welk,they will last longer than smaller ones.
I suppose there is a possibility of corruption (isn’t there always) but so far I haven’t seen any. There’s little reason to power it down often anyway.
I’ve decided to cancel the 923+ and have ordered the 1621+. Canceled the 4 x 14 TB Iron Wolf drives and have ordered 6 x 8 TB Iron Wolf drivrs which I intend to set on RAID 10. Wish me luck.
I would recommended a raid 5 and a local usb backup using hyper backup on the nas. Drives can be delivered next day in most locations worldwide otherwise I would say raid 6.
It should be added that R1600 is a typical dualcore CPU offering no reserves in case both cores are busy. While it is correct that single-thread speed is an indicator for roon´s snappiness, in reality things might look different with a vast library while playing ´fat streams´ (such as PCM2DSD upscalings) and using the text query (which is an ´all cores´ procedure in roon so the combined benchmark is more important).
With a library of 300k+ tracks you might push the R1600 beyond the limits of what is giving a smooth browsing experience. I have noticed that similar CPU cause noticeable slowdown with certain libraries growing beyond the 100k or 150k threshold which roon is stating in the specs for Nucleus One (which has a quad core CPU with higher overall performance than R1600).
It might work but adding albums or performing unusual operations (like text queries while playing a fat stream) might result in a compromised browsing experience.
That does not sound like a good idea as the 1621+ has an AMD V1500B quadcore which is significantly slower in single-core performance compared to the dualcore in the 923+. Browsing operations such as album and composition lists might feel sluggish with such a big library.
Not familiar with the Synology portfolio but for such a huge library I would opt for a really powerful CPU. In the QNAP world, a compact machine made for computing intense virtual operations like TVS-h674T would be the ideal choice. This one should be on par with a roon Nucleus Titan yet offering pro-grade NAS handling with 6 bays.
I guess I am confused… Synology says the 1621+ is faster than the 923+. I have a Synology NAS already which I use for backup. I like the brand and thought the same brand for Roon might simplify things. I can cancel everything and go with another product. How about QNAP TVS-h874X-i9-64G-US? I eould likely fill the 8 bays with smaller drives and use Raid 5. How say the community here?
It may well be for typical NAS tasks, because it has more cores and can do more things in parallel, although its individual cores are slower.
However, there’s not a single „faster“ value in computing, there are several factors that depend on the task at hand. Roon happens to benefit from single-core performance. (Though additional cores help with some things, as listed by @Arindal already)
Horses and water come to mind.