This is what happens when a Nucleus abuses steroids (Custom unRAID Roon Server & NAS)

[mentalfloss (Graham)]

If you’re a homelabber, or just someone who likes Tinkering and homebrew solutions I hope you might find this post helpful or vaguely interesting. It covers my recent build of a sweet little unRAID server that hosts both Roon server and a NAS for bulk music storage. Sort of like a Nucleus Titan’s less attractive but freakishly huge half brother. It’s the Jack Reacher of Roon servers.

The high level:
It’s an Intel 14th gen 10-core i5 based system with 24TB of storage in a redundant array.

Obviously this is rather overkill for Roon, but this is actually my home server that is running a bunch of services - including Plex for video media and Frigate NVR for home surveillance, and in fact a bunch of other things. So this not really a Nucleus (though I stand by the Jack Reacher thing), it’s a homelab server that happens to run Roon and store my large music library. A much more configurable and powerful version of installing Roon on a commercial NAS such as a Synology or QNAP.

Here’s what it looks like:

Here’s the parts list with notes:

1. Case: Fractal Node 304 miniATX case
   This is an awesome and sleek looking case, been around for ages but hasn’t changed or really been updated. Because it’s awesome. 6x 2.5"/3.5" internal drives bay and big juicy near silent fans.

2. Power Supply: Corsair RM750x 750w
   Chosen because of it’s excellent power efficiency at idle loads. Fun power supply fact: MANY (even very premium) ATX PSUs have rubbish efficiency at low loads. They sell them marketing their peak power output (because 750W sounds sexier than 20W). But most servers spend most of their life idling or working at relatively low loads and poor efficiency at low load over a servers lifetime will cost you a significant amount of money. Low noise, stability, and efficiency are more important than muscles.

There is a great list of relative PSU idle efficiencies here.

3. Motherboard: Topton Q670 NAS Motherboard.
   Chinese manufactured motherboard from Aliexpress. I know Chinese ‘non-name’ components get a bad rap but this is actually amazing. Especially for the price. Really well built and there is an incredible amount of I/O packed onto this teensy mini-ATX board. It supports 12th - 14th (latest) generation Intel processors. So if you won the lottery and went insane you could, in theory, put a 24 core i9 chip in this thing. Not that you would. But you could. Just saying.
   It has 3x NvME slots (one of which is PCIe 5x4), and a stupidly large number of SATA3 ports (8). Oh, and 2x 2.5G ethernet. And 20Gbps usb-C. And dual HDMI2 4K@60Hz. And takes DDR5 RAM. On a board that is 15 x 15cm. For $165 US dollars.

4. CPU: Intel i5-14400 10 Core / 16 Thread
   Great performance v price point chip. Built in video acceleration, and virtualisation support. Includes Intel Graphics which I wanted as the build has no PCI graphics card. A graphics card would have been a waste - it sits in a rack in my basement. I run it headless (managed via web interface and a piKVM - see below). But the Fractal case is so pretty it wouldn’t be at all out of place as part of your lounge room setup. And if you used it that way you could add a graphics and/or audio PCI card and use as a 4K video source and/or or a Roon endpoint. My Roon server just dishes up audio to my various endpoints - e.g. Kef LS50 II Wireless, Bluesound Node 2i etc.

5. RAM: 2x 16GB DDR5 4800Mhz Crucial RAM (32GB)

6. SSD Storage: 2x 1TB ADATA Legend M.2 NvME PCIe Gen4 SSDs (2TB)

7. HDD Storage: 3x 12TB Seagate EXOS HDD (24TB in 32TB redundant array)

8. Other Bits: A tower CPU cooler and some SATA cables.

Here it is all built, without it’s clothes on. Mmmm.

The operating system is unRAID which for those who are unfamiliar, is a great homelab server solution than combines a hypervisor (virtual machine host) and network attached storage (NAS) on a single linux based platform. It’s very easy to configure through a well designed and mature web UI and the NAS design takes a smart approach to bulk storage that is very power efficient - ideal for the homelab environment.

Virtualisation is through Docker containers or KVM based virtual machines. You could run Roon in a full VM in the OS of your choice (Linux, Windows). Or you could (as I do) install the excellent Docker image of Roon Server maintained by Steef de Bruijn. Containers use less resources. And are incredibly simple to install.

As I said, I run a bunch of other virtualised services on the server, including but not limited to:

• Frigate NVR
• Home Assistant
• Paperless-NGX
• Plex Media Server

Only Home Assistant HomeOS is a full VM, everything else is Docker containers.

If you’ve made it this far, you must be a fellow geek. Congratulations, hello, nice to meet you. This last bit is definitely the geekiest.

I wanted to not have to go down into my basement to reboot this server if something went wrong. Or worse, have to go down and attach a keyboard, mouse and screen to it if I ever needed to do a manual software update, or get into BIOS, etc. For I am nothing if not very lazy.

So I used the single PCIe slot on the motherboard to mount a PiKVM. This is really great little KVM over IP server that runs on a Rasberry Pi4. It’s mounted on this PCI form factor board (again from AliExpress) to which a Raspberry Pi4 is attached. It takes an HDMI feed from the unRAID server, and connects a virtual keyboard and mouse to a USB port. It also attaches to the ATX control pins on the unRAID server motherboard. This allows you to, from any browser, connect to a virtual monitor, keyboard and mouse as if you were physically in front of the machine. You can also do a hard reset via the control pins as if you were physically pressing the on/off/reset button on the server case. Oh and it’s PoE powered via the Pi’s ethernet port. Now I can reset and troubleshoot the whole system without getting murdered by the evil clown in my basement.

So far I’ve been extremely happy with this. Completely stable, and runs Roon Server like a dream (as well as transcoding 4K video on the fly in Plex), with all my music hosted on the NAS.

The whole build came out at about $1800 USD.

[Hampus_Martinsson]

Looks cool.
What Synology model and general hardware did you have before your new server?
I’m new to roon, just had a 60 day trial period and went for the lifetime licence 2 weeks ago. I’m running Roon on my Synology DS1821+ with 64 Gb RAM. I Had to get a Synology (400 Gb) original SSD NVMe for storagepool (with roon server and database) and I got a (2 Tb,)WD red NVMe for SSD read cashe. After the NVMe upgrades, I can’t say I miss anything when it comes to performance.
Would still be interesting to hear what kind of benefits one could expect with a server like yours over a optimized Synology 1821+.
I think it pros and cons. Your CPU are obviusly a lot better, but in what cases will your harware totaly outperform my Synology, it’s obviusly a lot better, but you had to spend a lot of time and maybe even more money than I did to get it up and running. You are running some experimental harware from Aliexpress, that sounds kind of risky. Are you running RAID 5?
You have 8 hdd slots on your motherboard to ad 5, do you also got 8 physical slots to put them in your NAS?
Would be great to get some further information.
Thank you in advance!

[gTunes]

Very cool build! Thanks for writing it up!

That KVM solution is very cool… I had no idea that existed.

[DDPS]

Very nice solution!!! Bravo. Good to see this documented. I might do it if I didn’t like Synology Audio Station & DS Audio so much as my secondary music server & offsite streaming solution! (It works infinitely better than PlexAmp or Audirvana with my music collection).

[mentalfloss (Graham)]

Wow, 1821+ - that’s a beast.

My old NAS was a Synology 1517+ (5-bay) - which was fine for Roon Server, but not grunty enough to run all my apps - especially video transcoding in Plex. So previously I had a separate machine running Proxmox VE for hosting linux containers. Part of the reason for this build was to consolidate my hypervisor and NAS into a single machine.

In terms of pro and cons of a custom build like mine vs a higher end Synology NAS like yours, like all things it depends on your use case.

Pros:

• Price. My entire build cost a bit less than a new 1821+ with no drives. So once you added drives, especially the Synology original NVMe and RAM (I know how Synology love to charge for accessories!) then I expect you will have spent quite a bit more than I did.
• Performance - this build will definietly out perfrom any commerical NAS I know of. Whether you care about this will depend on what you want to use it for. For just Roon it would be overkill. For me I need it to be able to handle UHD video transcoding and real time video motion analysis from 8 surveillance cameras without sweating (and without my Roon experience being degraded).
• Configuraibility/upgradability. A lot more optionality to spec to your speciifc requirements, and ability to upgrade with off the shelf components.

Cons:

• having to build it. If you want a turnkey solution that just works out of the box, the Synology will be better. Don’t get me wrong - I like Synology NASs a lot, and I think the DSM OS is excellent. Of course if you are a tinkerer, having to build it might be a big pro!
• no front loading hot swap bays. You actually have to take the cover off my build to swap out failed drives. Probably more relevant in a enterprise environment. But that said it is nice to be able to pull drives, e.g. to upgarde them to larger sizes, without opening the case.
• Documentation and after sales support. Depending on your technical knowledge and tolerance for having to troubleshoot yourself, a home build might not be for you.

With respect to your sepcific questions/comments:
but in what cases will your harware totaly outperform my Synology?
Most I think. Less array options but other than that, nothing I can think of.

you had to spend a lot of time and maybe even more money than I did to get it up and running
Time absolutely. Money - no, you pay a premium for the convienience, reliability and after sales support in a commercial NAS.

You are running some experimental harware from Aliexpress, that sounds kind of risky.
I wouldn’t call the Topton motherboard experimental. Their gear generally reviews well amongst geeks looking for lots of features at a great price. And as I said the build quality is really good and they individually factory test all the boards before they send them out. The biggest risk I suspect is around hardware compatibility as I’m sure they won’t have done as much compatibility testing etc as name brand boards. So you risk buying components that just don’t work properly with the board or at all, and won’t know until you try (I initially had some annoying issues with one brand of NVMes that magically disspeared with an alternate brand). If it all works once you put it together I don’t think there is any reason to expect they won’t be reliable. Motherboards generally just go, or don’t. Other cautions: after sales support is sketchy and there is ZERO documentation that comes with the board. Like ZERO.

I’m stoked with this motherboard now that I’ve got it all put together. I haven’t seen a mini-ATX NAS motherboard with as much I/O and support for properly fast CPUs anywhere. It’s really the heart of the build and makes it possible.

Are you running RAID 5?
unRAID uses a different system. Rather than striping data across drives like RAID it uses a dedicated parity disk (or disks). This has some up and some downsides, but for home use I think makes more sense - it allows spin down of individual disks in an array that aren’t being used and so is more power efficient. The result is the same - disk failure tolerance. It also uses a nice SSD caching system that improves read/write performance.

You have 8 hdd slots on your motherboard to ad 5, do you also got 8 physical slots to put them in your NAS?
The motherboard supports up to 8 SATA drives, but the Node 304 case can only house 6. If you wanted an 8 disk HDD array you’d just need a bigger/different case. But there are also 3 M.2 NVMe slots on the motherboard.

Hope that helps!

[DDPS]

@mentalfloss

Are you running RAID 5?
unRAID uses a different system. Rather than striping data across drives like RAID it uses a dedicated parity disk (or disks). This has some up and some downsides, but for home use I think makes more sense - it allows spin down of individual disks in an array that aren’t being used and so is more power efficient. The result is the same - disk failure tolerance. It also uses a nice SSD caching system that improves read/write performance.

Oh. I had assumed unRAID could do things like RAID 6, etc. The inability to do that would be a deal-breaker for me. See “Durability and preventing bit-rot” in my post on A Roon on (Synology) NAS Primer.

Still cool, though!!

[Hampus_Martinsson]

Thanks. Just preparing my mind, to what kind of NAS I will go for next time. Interesting to hear about your project. I think outperforming is not only about performance, i’ts also about ease of use, for the owner of the NAS. You already have your NAS up and running so you obviusly have got the knowledge needed.
But for now my optimized 1821+ with 64 Gb RAM, Synology original 400 Gb for storagepool with roon server and database installed, WD red 2 Tb NVMe for read cache, 6*8 Tb Seagate Ironwolfs in SHR2 (+one more the shelf, if/when I need to replace one of the current ones). Then ofcourse I also runs backups now and then. (I also got one more storagepool with single hdd for data I don’t care that much about).
Hooked the NAS up to UPS to prevent problems with power spikes or loss of power creating problems.
Works for me so far, but I don’t know maybe I will run into low performance issues in the future if my library keeps growing or if i start using the NAS for anything else than music server and storing data.

[mentalfloss (Graham)]

Oh. I had assumed unRAID could do things like RAID 6, etc. The inability to do that would be a deal-breaker for me. See “Durability and preventing bit-rot” in my post on A Roon on (Synology) NAS Primer.

Still cool, though!!

Depends what you need. You can run 1 or 2 parity disks in unRAID, so have 1 or 2 disk failure redundancy. So running 2 parity disks in unRAID is pretty much the same as RAID6 from a data protection standpoint. And unRAID does regular parity checks to maintain data integrity. I’m not sure but I think the main limitation of the way unRAID provides redundancy is that you don’t get the performance bump of some RAID types e.g. 0 and 1 where the read/write performance is proportional to the number of drives in the array. The way unRAID does it, read write performance is limited by the individual drive performance, or less sometimes due to simultaneous data disk and parity disk read/writes.

unRAID compensates for this being designed to have a large SSD pool alongside the HDD array. The SSD pool can be configured as RAID1 and is used as a independent storage pool, and as a cache to improve write performance to the array (and also save power if you configure things right).

On my system both Roon Server and my music collection live in the SSD pool, and both Roon library and my music are backed up to the HDD array (which has 1 disk parity), which is backed up to the cloud.

It took me a little while to get my head around the way unRAID does storage after previously having RAID5 on my Synology. Anyway, it works for me. I don’t know enough about storage to know if it’s better or worse than RAID5/6.

With respect to bit rot, I’m not entirely convinced it’s a thing. See Steamfrag post here. I could also completely blow this thread up by suggesting that I think music streaming is going to eventually completely replace local bulk music storage.

[mentalfloss (Graham)]

@Hampus_Martinsson

I think outperforming is not only about performance, i’ts also about ease of use, for the owner of the NAS.

I completely agree. Ease of use, lack of hassle, good support - all have real value, and that part of what you pay for.

@Hampus_Martinsson

Works for me so far, but I don’t know maybe I will run into low performance issues in the future if my library keeps growing or if i start using the NAS for anything else than music server and storing data.

If just Roon and storage is your main thing the 1821+ will smash it and I can’t imagine even the most massive Roon library would really stretch it. It’s a very nice bit of kit.

I built my own in part just for the fun of building it (I’m and enthusiastic amateur, not an IT professional), and because I knew I needed more processing power for my application that I could find in a Synology NAS for reasonable money.

[DDPS]

@mentalfloss

So running 2 parity disks in unRAID is pretty much the same as RAID6 from a data protection standpoint.

Thanks for the clarification. The external documentation I was reading didn’t seem to indicate this was a possibility. Sounds great.

@mentalfloss

With respect to bit rot, I’m not entirely convinced it’s a thing

Understood, but my use of ‘bit rot’ in that context is in regard to the weird copying back and forth from disk to disk that many people sometimes do with their collections over the years, and to me that introduces a very minor possibility of bad copies, which you may not discover for several years until you happen to listen to a recording for the first time in a while. So RAID 6 and RAID 6 like systems (such as SHR2) gives the filesystem extra copies of your data that the RAID system can use, through the data scrubbing process, to ensure high data integrity, and that is something that gives me peace of mind and is a priority over many other things for me in my system design…

@mentalfloss

I could also completely blow this thread up by suggesting that I think music streaming is going to eventually completely replace local bulk music storage.

Yes you could, although for oldies like me with a collection I’ve curated over 40+ years or so, it ain’t gonna happen. That said, for the youngsters, streaming makes the most sense for sure, at least from a financial standpoint.

[Hampus_Martinsson]

OK.
I’m also a IT enthusiast and amature. I think it’s fun with tech in general. I might go for building somthing like your NAS in the future, but no hurry for me. I think Synology is making to much of hardware restrictions, I will not accept that aproach in the future. Like lately when I had to go for the small 400 Gb Synology original RAM for storagepool, since DSM does not accept other for storagepools. I think it was somthing like $170 for that one, luckily it accepts my WD 2 Tb for NVMe ssd cache, although I don’t think it’s on the compatibility list. However the WD was much higher capacity, but kind of the same price as my low capacity Synology NVMe. (I’ts possible to crack DSM to go around this issue, but I didn’t like that idea).

[mentalfloss (Graham)]

@DDPS

Yes you could, although for oldies like me with a collection I’ve curated over 40+ years or so, it ain’t gonna happen. That said, for the youngsters, streaming makes the most sense for sure, at least from a financial standpoint.

I’m a gen Xr in the same boat, having spent countless hours slavishly ripping my CD collection and purchasing and downloading hires FLACs. So I too covet my collection like Smaug on his mountain of Dwarfen gold. I hear you man. Hence the overly elaborate storage and cloud backups. The weird things is, that if I’m honest with myself, a large proportion of my listening now is through TIDAL in Roon. The bastards invented paper money while I was busy counting my gold.

[mentalfloss (Graham)]

@Hampus_Martinsson

I think Synology is making to much of hardware restrictions, I will not accept that aproach in the future. Like lately when I had to go for the small 400 Gb Synology original RAM for storagepool, since DSM does not accept other for storagepools. I think it was somthing like $170 for that one, luckily it accepts my WD 2 Tb for NVMe ssd cache, although I don’t think it’s on the compatibility list.

Yes I agree - especially when it comes to hardware upgrades Synology is really painful and crazy expensive. I tried 3rd party RAM in my 1517+ and it was nothing but trouble. Ended up shelling out a crazy amount of cash for a Synology RAM module.

I understand why they do in though. It’s the only way of tightly controlling the reliability needed to be considered enterprise worthy hardware, and to prevent a whole lot of servicing and support cost. It’s just the price they charge for it which annoys me.

[Bryan_Allen (BryanA)]

Love this! Great writeup. Thanks for sharing!

[Stefan_Gliessmann]

That looks very familiar to me. I am also running my Roon server on my Unraid. Very happy, very stable!

[Geefes]

@Hampus_Martinsson

Works for me so far, but I don’t know maybe I will run into low performance issues in the future if my library keeps growing or if i start using the NAS for anything else than music server and storing data.

Exactly. This happened to me twice with large Synology NAS - after 6-7 years each time.

It looks like major technological leaps such as virtualization, real-time HD video re-coding and whatever comes next will make the last consumer NAS generation obsolete because their processors are small-scale and the devices are primarily designed for RAID support and high network throughput.

Incidentally, the NAS devices were also not able to meet the increased demands on Roon server performance (HD formats, multiple parallel streams and, most recently, software DSP filters).

I no longer use a Syno NAS for Roon, but a current Asus NUC and two 4 TB NVMe M.2 SSDs. The data is regularly backed up to a connected USB hard drive, which is duplicated every 6 months and stored in a different location.

[DDPS]

@Geefes

Incidentally, the NAS devices were also not able to meet the increased demands on Roon server performance (HD formats, multiple parallel streams and, most recently, software DSP filters).

I have plenty of this. Many current NAS models work exceedingly well with Roon. It’s worth checking out:

Roon on NAS Experience Index: 2024

Welcome to what I hope is the first in a series of threads on the Roon Forums, which was inspired by a nudge from @arindal. Many of us on the forums use Roon on a NAS with great success (last year, I started a long thread about my own experience). Despite much of what you might read online (even in these forums), Roon works incredibly well on a well-spec’d NAS, and is officially supported, so long as one is not using Roon in a Docker container. Per @arindal’s suggestion, this is the beginning o…

And:

A Roon on (Synology) NAS Primer

A Roon on (Synology) NAS Primer Introduction Over the past couple of years that I have been participating in these forums, I’ve discovered that there might be a benefit to a comprehensive overview of what makes Roon on NAS an especially compelling way of running Roon. I’ve written a lot about this notion in several disconnected forum posts here over the years, but I’ve been thinking about putting it all together in one place for a while. I realize, however, that I don’t represent every sort of …

[Graeme_Finlayson (The Mad Scientist)]

That’s a seriously nice setup.

I’ve been running a Synology RS3617xs since 2017 and can’t complain about it - it runs Roon with quite a bit of DSP, Plex (though I’m dabbling in Jellyfin at the moment), a whole bunch of IP cameras, networked file storage, off-site backup etc.

When it finally dies a death or is no longer supported, I can envisage homebrewing a setup like yours. The newer Rackstations are very pricey and Synology has really tightened down on hardware compatibility. The RS3617xs seems to be fairly forgiving of hardware - I upgraded the RAM to 32GB 3 years ago with generic, compatible ECC DDR3 and it’s been flawless. The PSU blew up last year, but I was able to obtain a replacement - I also bought a spare and a spare for the RX1217, so I should be good for a while, and although the Xeon E3-1230 v2 is getting very long in the tooth, CPU usage is always very low.

[gTunes]

I have an RS1221+, which I’ve had for a couple of years. It’s a rack mount model - network depth, which allows me to have a shallow that houses it and UniFi gear. It’s spec identical to the model that @Hampus_Martinsson has.

I run Roon and a bunch of other things in containers on the Synology device. It’s a great multi-purpose app server. If I weren’t so satisfied with it, I’d use @mentalfloss’ post as a blueprint and build something like what he has.

@DDPS

So RAID 6 and RAID 6 like systems (such as SHR2) gives the filesystem extra copies of your data that the RAID system can use, through the data scrubbing process, to ensure high data integrity, and that is something that gives me peace of mind and is a priority over many other things for me in my system design…

I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying here.

RAID 6 doesn’t have extra copies of the data. It has parity hashes. So it’s not so much a copy as it is the ability for missing data to be computed from the remaining data. This capability is based on the mathematical properties of XOR. If you have two disks, for example, in a RAID configuration, the following applies:

P1 = XOR(D1/B1, D2/B2)

meaning that parity 1 is the xor of disk 1, block 1 and disk 2, block 2. Because of the properties of XOR, if you lose D1/B1, you can get it back as XOR(P1, D2/B2). Similarly, if you lose D2/B1, you can get it back as XOR(P1, D1/B2).

RAID 6 intermingles parity blocks (XORs) among file data and it also stripes. UnRaid just puts the parity on a parity disk.

RAID 6 doesn’t have any more or less copies than UnRaid, they just do something very similar but a bit differently.

[DDPS]

Thank you. I’ve been wrong over the years in how I’ve represented this. It must’ve come from something that I was taught a while back about RAID 10 vs RAID 6. Anyway, you are correct. But for all intents and purposes it provides calculable significant protection of data integrity.

That said, it helps me appreciate that UnRAID would provide similar protection, although I’m not sure how I feel about the parity data on one disk. Thank you again.