Hi,
looking for a suitable NAS for running roon in addition to the standard storage usage. First NAS SSDs are available, and the NAS has Xeon inside. Video transcoding is not needed.
Seems to be a rather old model, but still supported, and you can get it new.
Is there anyone using this model with roon? And what about audio output without roon protocol? Is there any way to output audio via USB to S/PDIF for example?
Many thanks,
Matthias
That is a Xeon D CPU, not a Xeon. It’s a nice CPU, and an excellent choice for a NAS, but it doesn’t really turbo, has a relatively low max clock speed, and is designed with I/O and low power consumption as the primary design goals, not compute.
It will run Roon so long as as you don’t do any intensive DSP. Upsampling to DSD, for example, is guaranteed to fall over.
(I have an RS3617xs+ as my main NAS. I do not run Roon on it. I have Roon running on a separate, dedicated system with more powerful CPU while the NAS stores all the music files themselves. Roon user account on the NAS has read-only access to the music library so Roon can’t clobber anything.)
Thanks for your feedback. Hhmm… but the Xeon D is more powerful than NAS variants of Pentium or Celeron, isn’t it? It’s hard to find NAS models having an i5 or even i7.
That depends on your definition of “more powerful”. It is an I/O+low power consumption optimized SoC. It is not optimized for general compute.
That said, it is better than an Atom, ok. But that still doesn’t make it suitable for running DSP effects in Roon.
Save some money and get a cheaper Nas, and a good NUC to run ROCK on instead. Works lika a charm.
Actually, video transcoding or DSP are not important to me. NAS storage I/O performance is much more important since I edit Raw images and video. But - with roon as the music server - I feel better having a CPU that is somewhere between Atom/Celeron/Pentium and i3/5/7. geekBench shows the Xeon of the DS3617xs not being an overall outperformer but at least as a compromise between these two groups - if I read the lists correctly ;-).
I made one promise to myself - NO additional H/W for listening to my music library. I understand using e.g. an additional NUC would solve the technical problem at once. But that’s another PC which had to run just to be able to listen to music. And that’s a no-go ;-).
But for sure, I have to take the risk that running roon on a NAS may be totally unsupported or complicated some years later.
I use a Synology RS3617xs. I have done for several years.
I installed 2 Samsung 1TB SSD drives, and used them to create a RAID1 storage pool. I then created two volumes in that storage pool for Roon, a 256GB volume for the Roon DB, and the remainder to hold my FLAC collection.
It works flawlessly. In the background the NAS also runs a ton of stuff, including two windows VMs, and I have never had any issues with audio drops or similar.
I did upgrade the Synology RAM to the maximum amount.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
NAS is ordered 
. It’s clearly not a current model, but it’s definitely hard to find NASs which meet your storage AND your roon requirements 
. I’m optimistic 
.
Btw, if you edit video, I strongly encourage you to get 10G NIC (Intel brand card is cheaper than Synology part) and go 10G to your video workstation. Also, Synology supports iSCSI LUN, much better performance overall than CIFS.
Have fun!
Indeed, I already ordered the 10gbe extension . Since the rest is not yet 10gbe enabled, I will try channel bundling first.
Which OS do you use?