Unable to Copy Music to Nucleus One Internal Drive (ref#M02G1G)

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1

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· The Nucleus boots up and I can connect to it in the Roon app without issue, but I have a question about configuration/storage/attached devices

Describe the issue

Copying music to Nucleus One internal drive

Before getting into my question, allow me to say that Roon’s “technical support” and even the user forum profoundly SUUUUUUUUUCKS! This conclusion is probably a severe understatement. Despite the fact that I’m a lifetime Roon license holder, that I’ve posted here before, and that I am highly computer literate, Roon is in DIRE need of improving support. So what’s so wrong? I’m so glad you asked!

  1. There is no obvious “create a post” button in the customer forums.
  2. If you go to the Technical Support section, it loops you back to the customer forums again and again.
  3. Even if you succeed in creating a post, it isn’t clear exactly were you’re supposed to ask your question.
  4. If you DO succeed in creating a new post, and it doesn’t appear as you wished (it never does), editing is equally quirky.

Really, Roon - I expect better.

Now that the (well deserved) rant is finished, here’s my description with question(s):

I have a Roon Nucleus One. I’ve been running it with an external USB drive Library. This morning, I installed a 5TB, 2.5" internal drive in the Nucleus One. Roon Remote identified it & formatted it. So far, so good!

But I want the thousands of folders & files from the previous external USB drive to migrate to the internal HDD. The first thing I tried was opening the external USB drive on my Mac mini, opening the music folder, and highlighting all the folders there (each folder is for a single artist).

Then, additionally opening Roon Remote (a copy on the Mac mini), I dragged the ~2,800 folders and dropped them in the Roon “Artists” window. And? Nothing - the folders (with their files) just didn’t transfer.

I went back, opening a few of the folders, and dragged their files over onto Roon Remote. They copied fine.

Now the problem: I don’t want to have to go through thousands of folders dragging files onto the Roon drive. In fact, it’s even more tedious - Many of my artist folders have sub-folders for specific albums. Dragging files would take a month or more.

NOW the question: How can I move my music Library FOLDERS (currently hooked up via external USB drive to my Mac mini and connected via Ethernet to the Nucleus One) onto the Nucleus internal disc without moving the music files themselves?

Thanks kindly - Glenn Young

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Use Finder instead of Roon (the Remote), as easy as moving/copying files on the disk of your Mac after you made the initial connection to the Nucleus.

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Hey @Glenn_Young,

Thanks for writing in and sharing your report! @BlackJack is spot on correct in their above response, using Finder from your Mac will likely be the best route for you to take with your current setup.

And while we appreciate you sharing your thoughts on the Technical Support Typeform, the support form was designed to provide users with helpful troubleshooting steps upfront, reducing the back-and-forth on common issues and allowing us to assist more efficiently. We absolutely welcome feedback on how we handle support, we have a dedicated area on the community for it - the Feedback category, where we encourage users to share their thoughts.

However, the Technical Support category is meant for resolving issues, not for broader discussions about our support process. If you have specific feedback, we’d appreciate it being shared in the appropriate space so we can review it properly. Thanks for your future cooperation here.

Let us know if you need help with your Nucleus issue—we’re happy to assist! :+1:

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Hi @BlackJack - Thanks for the reply.

When I go to my network in Finder, I see “nucleusone.” If I open that folder, I have a “Data” subdirectory. Opening the subdirectory, I have (what looks like) the Nucleus’s operating system. When I look into that Data directory, I have more subdirectories (one of which is titled “Storage.”

Initially, I tried copying my files to “Storage - Internal Storage.” The folder titles were all written there, but none of the music files. I deleted them.

Then, I tried copying my files just to “Storage.” Nothing transferred (not even the folder titles).

Then, I tried copying my files to “Data.” I got a message saying there was insufficient space (?).

Then, I backed up yet another level, and tried copying my files to “nucleusone.” I get a popup saying I need to authenticate (?). I tried logging in as anything but “Guest” and was declined every time.

So where, exactly, on the Nucleus (that Finder can see), should I copy the files? I’m sure I’ve somehow overcomplicated your instructions, but I’m just not making any progress.

Thanks - Glenn

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What? Including the Internal Storage folder? If so, try a reboot of your Nucleus to see if that restores this folder. If not (there is still a folder called “Internal Storage”), please follow the posted guide and copy the files into that one.
If you deleted the folder and a reboot doesn’t recover it, you can try and format the internal drive again.If that also doesn’t help, please wait for a reply from official support.

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This is a NUC in windows 10 but the principal will be the same

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I simply copy and paste to the InternalStorage Drive

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The MusicLibrary folder has multiple levels of sub folders which copy with no issue.

Eqully the I can move files from the USB drive to the iternal drive by copy and paste

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If I was asking for help, I would not preface my request with “you and your forum suck.”

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I am not highly computer literate, but I am a lifetime subscriber to Roon. Maybe this will answer some of your questions…

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Hi @Glenn_Young,

As others have mentioned (and you’re in good hands here) the location you’ll want to copy/transfer your files to is indeed the Internal Storage folder.

Perhaps it might be worth testing out copying a smaller subsection of your library first, and see how it goes.

We could also enable diagnostics on your Nucleus to take a closer look at what might be going on behind the scenes when you attempt to transfer the files - let us know the specific date and time when you next attempt and we’ll investigate further.

Thank you! :pray:

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Interesting additional factoids:

  1. When you use a computer to copy and paste / drag & drop, then the data must flow through the computer.

  2. My 10:100 Ethernet is (or should be) adequate for a quick transfer.

  3. Regardless of how fast your Ethernet terminals and wiring are, the router is usually a choke point (in my case a Netgear Orbi cable modem / router / Wi-Fi hub combination)

  4. Ethernet switches are almost always significantly faster than routers.

IF all the above are more or less true, then in my case, putting the source drive on the Nucleus side of the router would actually slow down the transfer because then data would have to flow through the router TWICE (once on the way from the source disc to the Mac mini and again on the way back to the Nucleus’ internal disk).

However, what WOULD (at least theoretically) speed up data transfer significantly would be to (temporarily) insert a high speed switch in place of the router. Then, the Mac & source drive could communicate directly with the Nucleus without a router in between. When the transfer was complete, put the router back in, activate Roon Server, and everything should be peachy.

Comments?

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  1. True (for typical home user environments)
  2. If you have time / the amount of data is not big
    For current consumer network electronics the wire speed is 1Gbps (Gigabit Ethernet) or higher, Fast Ethernet 10/100 Mbps only is a standard from the past and is at least 10 times slower than Gigabit Ethernet.
  3. Yes, quick routing needs resources a consumer router doesn’t have – this is usually o.k. as wire speed routing between several interfaces/networks is not needed as they have to route “only” internet access on a still often much slower speed than the internal network.
  4. Switches, even switches that are built-in into consumer routers, are “wire speed” nowadays. No speed-up is to be expected until the data needs to be routed (different {sub}networks) in which case you can no longer simply replace a router with a switch anyway.
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Hi @BlackJack -

It seems that I’ve yet another problem with the internal drive on my Nucleus. I installed a 5TB drive, yet the “Data” folder (the only one I’m able to access as a subdirectory of “nucleusone”) is being identified as a ONE TB drive.

Immediately prior to starting the data transfer, I used Roon to reformat the entire drive. Why am I getting only one Tb in the “Data / Storage / InternalStorage” folder?

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Edit: Is it from the web configuration interface where you get the 1TB reading (IIRC the size should show there)? Using a file browser to inspect a remote folder to determine the size of a (remote) drive is flaky at best or not working at all (folders don’t have sizes). And Roon OS doesn’t even share the second drive (as a standalone share) – it is just a sub-folder of the default share. The “Data” folder is part of the OS-Disk, so how big is your OS-Disk? Does it match the 1TB reading perhaps?

Edit: Probably wrong reason, see above.
I don’t know? Maybe someone might be able to tell if you post details about your 5TB drive (Brand, Model, link to store, maybe even pictures of labels on the drive). If the drive was a cheap offer that sounded “to good to be true” then that (“not true”) might be the case (a scam with 1TB sold as a drive with higher capacity).

Note: There are a lot of fakes and scams out in the wild (Amazon, Wish, Ali-Express, …), sometimes even reputable shops and distributors fall for good fakes.

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By spelunking in the Roon Nucleus manual, I got my answer. I found a section that said the Nucleus would support an internal HDD (up to 2TB) or an internal SSD (up to 8TB). So, apparently, only 2TB of my 5TB drive will be used, and almost half of that is taken by Roon OS files. I wish I’d known this before I spent $$$ to buy a 5TB, 2.5" drive specifically for the Nucleus.

This is getting unacceptably tedious! I am thinking of abandoning the idea of internal storage for the Nucleus. The negatives are just overwhelming. They include:

  • Significant limits on the type and size of internal storage that can be used
  • Profoundly slow transfer speeds to the internal drive
  • The fact that when the internal drive malfunctions (and this is always a when, not an if), the hassle of loading the drive with music will happen all over again
  • The fact that the internal drive uses a proprietary format, preventing the user from installing music on the drive prior to installing it in the Nucleus
  • The fact that the Nucleus itself will take a significant amount of drive space on the internal drive for the Roon OS, whether you want it to or not
  • The fact that internal drive capacity available for music is significantly less than the available drive space less the Roon OS files
  • The fact that the user cannot use computer software to determine the condition of the internal drive or the size of the directories

In short, one has to seriously ask why Roon even decided to include an internal drive when that option is so severely compromised and in so many ways! My Nucleus was not inexpensive, and one of the reasons I chose to buy it was for the all-in-one convenience of being able to use the Nucleus’ internal drive. Now I find that the internal drive is almost useless due to the limitations and compromises associated with it. I expected better from Roon.

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This is a lot of half truths, individual issues of your setup and misunderstandings.
The Nucleus comes with one drive preinstalled for the OS and Roon that can’t be used for music storage at all. A user can install an optional second hard drive for music – this drive will only contain what the users puts on it, Roon OS will not use that drive.
If your network (I think you wrote “Fast Ethernet”) is slow then it takes long to load a big library over the network, a faster network can help here.
You need to copy the files onto an external USB-Drive too. Only in latest generations USB became quicker than Gigabit-Ethernet and only if you have a machine with such a modern USB implementation, a drive that also supports it and that is based on a technology that can keep-up with those speeds (SSD).
So if your machine is sufficiently modern then USB may beat Gigabit-Ethernet and IIRC are currently no Nucleus variants with higher network speeds available (please correct me if I’m wrong). Heck even a moderately old machine’s USB may beat Fast-Ethernet.
The size limits present in the manual likely stem from physical height limits (Nucleus variants may have differing limits) and that at some point in time bigger drives that fit the height limit were not available. It seems unlikely that if you can fit an 8TB HDD it wouldn’t work just the same as an 8TB SSD. But here Roon Labs would have to assure.

The format is not proprietary but a stock Windows or MacOS does not support it AFAIK-- there may exists (proprietary) third-part drivers to buy though. I never used them so I don’t know how good they are.

Again: Directories/folders do not have a size – their content has a size. You can use a computer to determine the size used by the contents of remote folders/directories using SMB. What you may not be able to figure out easily though is how much free space is on the drive as it requires you to know the drive’s size and do the subtraction yourself.

Note: SMB is a high level file sharing protocol for folders, it does not share drives (physical devices).

It is up to you as user to decide if you want to use internal, external, or network storage with your Nucleus. All of them have their own bag of pros and cons. You can also mix the available storage options, you are not bound to use just one. Especially users of internal drives may end-up adding an additional external drive as the internal drive can’t be used for backups.

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Gentlemen - This has become a profoundly convoluted thread. We are discussing both apples and oranges.
Apples = data transfer speeds when writing to the Nucleus’s internal drive.
Oranges = data storage capacity on the Nucleus’s internal drive.

For now, let us please ignore the Apples and focus on the Oranges. I installed a 5TB, 2.5" drive. Due to miniaturization in the HDD industry, the drive fit in the Nucleus One’s bay with room to spare. Using Roon, I formatted the drive.

I then looked at the drive (named “Data”) in Mac Finder. When I do, I find the following folder structure already on the freshly formatted drive:

Codecs (0 bytes)
MachineSettings (2.1 MB)
RAATServer (30.4 MB)
README.txt (367 bytes)
Reinstall (380 bytes)
RoonGoer (23.1 MB)
RoonOS (3.1 MB)
RoonServer (21.46 GB)
Storage (1TB)
tailscaled.state (2 bytes)

Now, if, as @BlackJack says, “A user can install an optional second hard drive for music – this drive will only contain what the users puts on it, Roon OS will not use that drive.” why are these files showing up on the “Data” drive after a fresh format?

Second of all, with what should be a full 5TB of space on the Nucleus’ internal drive, why is Finder telling me that the destination drive is full after I’ve transferred only about 1.3 TB of music to it?

These questions have nothing to do with “half truths, individual issues of your setup and misunderstandings.” These questions are clear and fully legitimate questions pertaining to how the Roon Nucleus One deals with internal storage.

So to summarize - With 5TB of storage on the Roon Nucleus One’s internal drive, I should have room to install my 2TB of music Library (twice) with room left over. Why is my data transfer stopping (“the destination disk is full”) after I’ve transferred only 1.3TB of data?

Thanks - Glenn

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Why not? It’s not that you would look at the folder that represents the added internal storage, but at the share’s base folder. I wrote already that you should not look at that.

Most-likely because you did not copy them into the right folder. If you copied your files directly in that “Data” folder they are likely gone after the next reboot (or you created a big problem for your Nucleus by filling-up its OS drive, leaving no space for the OS and Roon).

Try to follow the guide and post at which point you ran into trouble.

So far it looks like you are unable to copy the files into the right folder “InternalStorage”.

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Allow me to clarify - I DID copy files to (and ONLY to) the subfolder called “InternalStorage.” I also did run out of space (“the destination disk is full”) after 1.3TB of data was transferred DESPITE the fact that a 5TB drive is installed.

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Because the Data folder is not the internal disk. The internal disk is represented as Data/Storage/Internal Storage.

For understanding, operating systems that stem from the Unix family (like Linux, Roon OS, or macOS for that matter) have only one folder tree, starting at „/”

Physical disks can be mounted anywhere in that tree, and they are then represented by a folder. E.g., /Users/joe/Documents can be disk 1 and /Users/joe/Music can be disk 2.

In the same way, /Data on Roon OS represents a higher level in the folder tree and contains content from the primary (OS) disk. Below it, the secondary (Music) disk is mounted in the folder tree at /Data/Storage/InternalStorage

(Note the difference to Windows, where every disk is represented as a different drive letter that starts at the top level).

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Can you show us a screenshot of the Web Administration Interface page of the Nucleus One?

It would be interesting to see what you have being reported in this section:

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