Two USB drives or SMB share?

I have my musicfiles on a usb-drive connected to the NUC. I choose this method for convenience, it’s easier to transfer to a new system if needed.

I would attach the USB drives to the ROCK machine. I have a usb drive on a ROCK machine and it functions fine. My Drive is a USB 3 drive and it is connected to the NUC’s USB 3 port.

Dick and Daniel -
Thank you both for your prompt replies. I haven’t gotten my NUC yet (just ordered), but can you attach two separate external drives to it (both USB 3.0 drives)? If so, will ROCK recognize them both?

The other option was to use the directory shares from the existing server, which would continue to hold the music files (just as it is now). I understand that this should also be possible with Rock (making the Windows Server act somewhat as a NAS for the NUC). Is that not possible or a bad idea?

you will avoid headaches with rescanning and you will avoid another machine making noise in your room if you attach your drives do the NUC.

I personally have so over NASs… they are an obsolete relic of times when storage was small.

So I can attach two separate USB 3.0 external drives then, correct?

The noise will be the same as it always was plus the NUC, which isn’t supposed to be noisy. I have these in rooms in which I do not typically listen to music anyway.

correct.

Later on, you could even consolidate those into 1 drive and maybe even an SSD in the future.

That’s definitely an option for the future. However, the two drives are 4TB and 6TB. Hopefully technology will progress and prices will come down…

10tb single drives exist for under $400… 12tb and 14tb coming soon

Really?

On the contrary, NAS (and SAN based storage) make more and more sense with higher and higher network speeds for so many reasons.

In theory I’d agree, because you get multipoint accessible content – but in reality, you get shitty generalized components (or in the case of synology, components barely capable of serving content and that’s it), large/noisy cpu and case fans, extra power consumption.

Specialized appliances for specific purposes usually leave you with a better experience.

The QNAP NAS are much better spec’d to be more generic appliances, but they also suffer from the above issues.

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I imagine danny doesn’t do this, but for me one nice feature of plugging USB drives into my ROCK system is that it also functions as a NAS. There’s an SMB share at smb://ROCK/data, the USB drives are in ROCK/data/storage, everything is very simple.

I am sure QNAP/Synology type NAS appliances have features this doesn’t, but really a simple usb drive -> SMB share is all I want out of a NAS, and this way I don’t need to find space for yet another object under my desk.

Exactly my point, a NAS appliance used as a NAS and not a generic application server
is pretty darn good at it. However, if USB Rocks your world, that also skins the cat. :slight_smile:

Just to report back here. 2 USB hard drives attached to the NUC work very well.

Hi all,

is there a list of USB drives anywhere that people have used successfully with ROCK running on a NUC? The reason I ask is that I have had issues over the years with external USB drives connected to NAS or Windows boxes going to sleep (powersave mode) and becoming unavailable. This seems to be built into the drives themselves and the OS cannot wake them when it tries to access. Unplugging and replugging wakes them up but it isn’t much use when it needs to be 100% available.

Agreed. I’ve got a QNAP TS-251 with a Celeron processor, 6TB of storage, 64GB SSD for the database and 4GB of RAM. It ran Asset flawlessly for my Naim streamer for over a year until last weekend when I took delivery of a Meridian 218 and AC200. I then found that the tops of tracks were clipped off as playing started and discovered that removing every app that wasn’t needed by the NAS system stripped the sever down to bare bones operation at which point Roon ran like a charm. The server is a bit under-specced according to the Roon boffins but with it running my music files and nothing else (which is all it was ever intended to do), it’s just fine.

@Anthony_B I use these LaCie drives available in 3 to 8tb.

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I use the WD My Passport

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The Roon team loves the WD My Passports… cheap and small, they just work.

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I have two WD drives in single cases attached with USB 3.0. I would probably try using the NUC’s Thunderbolt 3 connection if I were setting this up with a new drive…

I want to 2nd the WD drives.