I currently have a Naim Uniti Star in my living room, with a USB thumb disk inserted in the back on which I have used the Star to rip a number of CDs to. I also have a QB2 in my bedroom.
I am currently using the 2 weeks Roon trial with Roon installed to one of my Windows laptops (none of which are switched on 24x7).
In a few weeks, I am thinking of getting either a QNAP NAS, on which my plan would be to install Roon on one M.2, and use a second for general file storage. Or most likely I will buy a Nucleus One as I don’t intend to leave a PC on constantly.
I will add one of my spare M.2 SSDs to the Nucleus. How would I transfer the files from my thumb disk to the M.2 in the Nucleus please?
I attached the thumb disk to my laptop, and Roon happily catalogued it. However, I’d like to free this up and use the Nucleus internal storage. Naim stores the CDs on the thumb disk in a JSON format. Would I just copy this “as is”, or would I have to do some re-jigging of the format using something like Notepad++ to store on the Nucleus itself.
Just an additional question, more out of curiosity than anything. The Nucleus has Roon installed on it. If you have to add your own M.2 for storage, what is Roon OS installed to. Does it have a dedicated M.2 for the OS, or is it firmware?
Well the nucleus is a computer so not much difference leaving it on vs the computer you are using probably.
Any internal drive added needs to be formatted by the Roon OS. And you have to copy to it over the network there is no direct copy from usb to internal drive.
My suggestion is to get an external usb drive. Format to exfat. Copy all music to it and then plug it into the nucleus. That way you will also gave a li ation to do database backups. You cant back up the database to internal drives.
You can buy an external HDD or SSD and store music on that. Having music connected directly is advised. Although, a lot do connect via a NAS system. As well as running ROON on it. Again, I would personally have a dedicated machine for ROON; be that a NUC or Nucleus that can be on 24/7.
My setup is very similar to one of the options you describe: I have Roon installed on a QNAP NAS, with the Core and database installed on an M.2 drive, and the music on an HDD drive.
Works perfectly well for me and runs smoothly.
As far as I can see, the main advantage the Nucleus offers is that it’s quiet and more stylish in your living room. A 6-bay QNAP NAS isn’t loud, but it has a certain size and is still about as loud as a regular PC/Laptop.
But in my case that doesn’t matter, as the NAS is in the utility/technic room of our house and so it doesn’t really matter.