I am looking to upgrade from an old Synology RS812 that has soldiered on well past its sell by date with a view to use it as a Roon Core.
The problem as with almost every Synology NAS is the woefully underpowered CPU usually some flavour of Marvell or Intel Atom.
As I want to keep the 1U rack mount format I noticed the RS1619XS+ although a lot more than I wanted to pay seems to fit the bill with an Intel Xeon D-1527 processor and decent memory expansion.
It can also take M.2 SSD but I believe that can only be used for cache?
So…how best to configure the Synology to accommodate Roon?
As it is a 4-bay should I use one slot for a Samsung 2TB SSD purely for Roon for example leaving the remaining 3 slots for spinners to do the rest of the tasks that I need the NAS to perform?
Can I put my music library (currently 12,500 tracks) onto the same SSD or should that be on a separate disc/partition etc?
Any hints/tips would be much appreciated as although I have 30+ years in IT I am very much a newbie when it comes to Roon.
Also thinking of going Bluesound Vault 2i to ‘upgrade’ my library to an uncompressed format rather than the current 192kbps .mp3 that resides on my RS812 to feed my multiroom Sonos (for as long as they all work together as I have 4 legacy devices out of 7 zones) and use with my Marantz SR8012 with built-in HEOS setup.
Just keeping my options open as looking to minimise my exposure to Sonos based on the latest revelations from the company.
Any hints, tips, ideas etc. would be most welcome.
The price cost for getting a NAS with an i3 or better might be better spent by setting up a dedicated RoonServer using a NUC and then it won’t matter which CPU you get for the NAS.
Hi Glyn,
The specs of the RS1619XS+ should be absolutely fine. I have to agree, that this device is makes only sense if you really need it for other purposes as well.
You should also be aware, that there is still an incompatibility with Synology’s Open vSwitch feature. When vSwitch is enabled on Synology devices, Roon Server won’t find any Chromecast, Sonos or Airplay devices in your network.
And if you also plan on using virtual machines or docker on the RS1619XS+, you will need the vSwitch.
my opinion? let the NAS keep the role it was defined for: being a Network Attached Storage.
For other roles like being a roon core, get other devices. It will keep you from getting headaches in a few years
Hi Glyn!
You would need an Intel cpu Syno to run roon, and I’ve successfully run it on my 718+ and a 918+ - the real issues arrive when you enable dsp, stream to multiple zones at the same time or if you have a very large library. Mine has about 10k local highres tracks and yielded no issues, but I rarely used dsp features or multiroom.
Since you’re clearly planning to replace your syno anyway, a lower spec nas for storing content in combination with a nuc with rock seems like a good combo. That’s what I ended up with myself - the ARM cpu based synos are less expensive, and assuming you use the nas mainly for storage, a lower spec recent model of nas will do just fine serving content to the rock nuc over SMB
Currently running a Synology DS218+ w/ two 10TB hard drives (Seagate IronWolf ST10000VN0004). It is suggested for the Roon Core to run on a static drive, so am using a GLYPH-TECHNOLOGIES ATOM 275SSD USB3/USB plugged into the USB slot and the Roon Core lives there. This setup is fantastic, fast, quiet and relatively future-proof.
I am a new Roon user. I have a DS916+. I installed Roon core to HDD folder the first day of my trial period. Now I understand SSD (for core) is recommended.
I have 8G RAM, 2 x 8 TB HDD (mirroring) and 2 free bays. I am planning to transfer the core to SSD.
Should I use USB or eSata or use one of the free bays?
If I do use the bay should I mirror for the safety of the core?
And how do I transfer the Roon folder (Core) to a new adress? Will it function the same way?
Thanks.
I did that ; I connected a Toshiba T5 (half empty) to USB.
I was about to set up Roon , I noticed one of my big Red 8TB HDD failing!
Not a good day. Well, music is the consolation.
Consider QNAP. Much more for your money. My first NAS was Synology. When it came time to replace, I compared Synology and QNAP at similar price levels and QNAP won out without even being close. Now that I’m set up with it, I like the OS software better as well. I have one of the i5 based models and it runs Roon (thank you Christopher!) and Plex just fine. Roon is on the internal SSD. I found using those for caching did not help performance. It was explained on the QNAP forum, but I don’t recall the logic now. It works better for different kind of applications that as media server, file storage.
