Synology performance improvement options?

I’m currently using roon on a synology 1019+. Performance for general listening can be sluggish. I already have a small SSD for the roon system and library files - the music files are stored on RAID however. And I have 16GB of ram on the NAS. My library is around 1TB and about 50K music files.

I have a few blusound speakers around the house and a hifiberry connected to my main audio receiver. I control everything with iOS devices or the desktop roon software on my MAC.

It looks like the synology’s celron is just a bit underpowered. I could live with it but I want to try a few options.

I have an underused i7-4765T@2Ghz windows machine with an SSD I can experiment with but have a few questions:

Can i install Roon - either windows or ROCK on it and still use my NAS for storing music files? I really like the security and backup features of the NAS. I don’t want to store music on the roon device.

Can I run two ROON servers at once or do I need to shut down the one running on the synology first? I’d like to be able to compare them a bit.

I basically want to see if there’s a big difference with roon running on windows. If not, then eventually I’ll just upgrade the NAS and live with it. Or maybe I’ll buy another NUC and setup a dedicated ROCK device.

TIA!

Yes you can use the NAS for music storage and backups with the Roon core on another platform. You mentioned several workable solutions, the best in my opinion being the dedicated ROCK device.

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Yes. You can set up a Roon server and have it serve up the library on your Synology NAS. I have done this and it works well. However, in my experience, Roon works a bit better when using internal storage.

My current setup is with a Roon ROCK with internal storage. I run Robocopy on my desktop to synchronize the music folder from my NAS to the internal storage on the ROCK.

This gives me the best of both worlds. I get the performance benefits of Roon using internal storage while also having more secure storage for my music collection on the NAS. The NAS also backs up my music collection to the cloud so I have disaster recovery if needed.

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I feel your pain. This may be of interest.

  1. Install Roon on Windows or put ROCK on it? Yes! The caveat being ROCK on a machine that isn’t a NUC may have issues so make sure you can go back to Windows if required.
  2. Run two Roon Servers at once? Yes. Roon willl ask you to de-authorise one if both are active. You don’t have to disable it elsewhere.
  3. You should see a lift in performance, if you don’t you may have other network related issues so explore that before splashing lots of cash on NAS upgrades.

Thanks! What are the issues of using a non-ROC? I have a Lenovo Thinkcentre, which is their version of a NUC. It has a intel i7-4765T 2Ghz, 16gb ram, and an ssd.

I’d like to use that one and get a faster NUC I can run Windows 11 on.

The ThinkCentre should be OK, some use them here with ROCK. You need to be able to get the bios to legacy mode, not UEFI. But the only real penalty of running Roon via Windows is having to manage Windows.

Ah - I can do legacy mode! It’s actually stuck in legacy mode – I spent all morning tryin figure out how to change it to UEFI so I could try to install win 11.

The only dilemma is if I get a new NUC, the ones that claim to be windows 11 ready are > $1K

Thx!