Its not cosmetic, and this use case matters to .1% of Roon users, if that. But it matters to me. What would really helps is if ANYONE has a USB4 or Thunderbolt 4 drive running on a Rock, Nucleus One or Titan. Otherwise you are just repeating what SHOULD work, and it does not.
This is a bug, and all the logical advice I’ve heard so far does not apply. I am not new to this, by any small measure.
I am not interested in the workarounds, I don’t really need it. Again, 2 Nucleus + , a 21TB NAS, and two rocks and a Nucleus + Owner, IT professional, and a very experienced ROON user since 2018. I must have setup over a dozen other Roon implementations for people.
That’s the wrong screen; you should be looking for local folders, not network shares. You appear to be adding a network folder (of itself). Instead, browse the local filesystem (of ROCK.)
It is possible that the PC is seeing the OWC 1M2 as a “UASP” (USB Attached SCSI Protocol) internal drive and not a standard external USB drive. OWC mentions that this can happen.
If this is the case, then the limitations imposed on internal drives by ROCK (like needing to be ext4 format) might also be carried over to the “external” drive that the OS is treating as “internal”.
I’d guess it is with the drivers since that is what OWC seems to imply, especially since one of their first resolution steps is to download the latest USB drivers for your OS. Since ROCK has it’s drivers baked in, you might try using a different OS where you can load drivers, like Ubuntu, DietPI for PC, or even Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, along with the appropriate RoonServer.
That might work. And your right, those speeds are super overkill. Even a lowly external HDD USB drive is more than fast enough for music playback.
Is the thunderbolt drive actually connecting over the Pcie bus carried on Thunderbolt? If this is the case, it may be seen as an Nvme drive or a sata controller with a drive attached and thus be indistinguishable from an internal device. Such a drive would not be seen as a “USB mass storage” device.
Whether or not it is seen as external in Windows is unrelated to whether or no it is a USB Mass Storage device. If it is pcie over thunderbolt it is unlikely to be the latter but could still be seen as external.
However, if RoonOS treats USB Mass Storage devices as external and SATA or Nvme drives as internal, then it may be treating the Pcie over thunderbolt drive as internal as well.
Could you verify if someone a USBC connected drive to a ROCK that works? It doesn’t show under \Rock\storage. It does work if I go through a USBA converted, but that kind of defeats the use case (I will need more than 3 ways to get in when I am done). Does USB4 work differently, if at all.
I’ve already suggested this. But you don’t need an adapter; simply disable Thunderbolt in the NUC BIOS, and the drive will be picked up as USB-C, and mounted external.
USB is mounted external in Linux whereas PCIe is not unless it’s a desktop OS with addition Thunderbolt tools (drivers) not found in the kernel.
When you connect to your Windows PC to copy files you’ll benefit from the higher transfer rate of Thunderbolt, but this performance is not necessary for streaming.
Yes, I did try turning off TB support previously, and saw it didnt show the drive at all. I retried it again with similar results. At this point I would just run it under Win 11, and look out for someone that does this succesfully. There was one time I got it to run, but am unsure what brought that about. I will just wait for an update that resolves this.
As pointed out, there is no need for Thunderbolt 4 speed, USB4 is way better than needed.
Since USB-C cables and ports are cross compatible, this should work. Therefore, try a different cable and update the BIOS and Thunderbolt firmware on the NUC.
If I find time over the holiday, I’ll update my NUC to the latest Roon OS image and see if this affects the drive I connect to the Thunderbolt port.
Otherwise, it may be that the device you’re using isn’t standards compliant.
Thus, it is a thunderbolt 4 external SSD which uses NVME over 4 lanes of PCIe, it will look like any other NVME drive unless the platform has additional drivers to recognise when the PCIe lanes utilised are those supplied by the thunderbolt port.
Such a device will not function when connected to a pure USB 3 or earlier port which is the experience that the OP described. PCIe connectivity is an option for USB-4. Thus some USB 4 ports may accomodate a PCIe NVME drive whilst others may not.
This isn’t my understanding, theThunderbolt, when connected to a USB-C interface*, is backward compatible. Indeed, the OWC states that it is backward compatible with USB 3.2.
Therefore, a Thunderbolt drive connected via USB should be recognized as an external USB drive. But, after reading various Linux threads it seems that these devices can misbehave, and don’t always report correctly. Firmware and NUC BIOS were often cited as the culprits.
Maybe boot an Ubuntu live image and check the logs?
*The interface needs to be Thunderbolt compatible – the NUC’s is.
Actually, there are only two chipsets (afaik) that does support USB4 in the market (not Tb4 necessarily) and a large majority of them use ASM2464PD chips. TB3 support is more prevalent.
This Nuc will detect a connected USBC drive on Thunderbolt ocassionally, only to lose connection in a later session. I’ve also already tested it on earlier USB 3.1 SSDs, with similar results.
@Wade_Oram concurs with my observations. And it falls back to 10 gbps when using a USB-A connector, as expected.
Do you mean a USB-only drive connected via the USB-C connector? If so, I’ve found this to work well with ROCK for many years. However, I’m not running the latest version of ROCK, so will try updating soon.
And if you use a USB C that is not Thunderbolt certified, it will work with USB C connected storage, as @Wade_Oram had accurately stated. Thanks for your accurate insight and help on this, it was informed and useful.
