First to cut to the chase. I am absolutely delighted in the upgrade of my Roon Server from a QNAP TVS-471 to the Nucleus Titan with a 4TB SSD.
I have run Roon since day one ten years ago on a QNAP NAS. I have been using the TVS-471. It’s 10 years old now and I had begun thinking about buying a new QNAP NAS to replace the aging NAS. 10 years just feels like time to replace it. The replacement I had been looking at is the QNAP TVS-h674-i5. It’s $2400. Not at all inexpensive. Then Roon changed the platform and now my QNAP will only run Roon on a Docker Container. I have been running on the original last build that supported the native QNAP installation for months now. I am pretty technical but the Docker instructions just seemed daunting.
So, after thinking about it forever I decided last week to pull the trigger and buy the Titan. I probably could have gotten away with the Nucleus One but I like to think long term and the spec difference convinced me to go big. As I add more and more content over the next few years, I wanted the extra capacity so that’s the reason I bought the Titan. Considering that the new QNAP was $2600 and the Titan is $4000 the difference in price seemed to work itself out considering that I was getting a new box that is fully supported. If I bought the QNAP I would still have to work out the Docker thing and I still had no guarantee that Roon would not somehow eliminate the Docker configuration sometime in the future. At least that’s what I told myself.
I followed the migration guide and it was certainly helpful but my migration did not exactly follow the steps in the guide but because I understood the concept of restoring the database from a USB stick I was able to fill in the blanks. It did not take long until I had the configuration completed and I had a working system. My music library was still on my QNAP. The migration guide said that the music shares would come over intact but that was not the case for me. I had to modify the path of each share and soon I had all my music. I have more than 6000 albums and 75,000 songs. Now I wanted to move my music from the NAS to the 4TB internal storage. There is a guide online for how to do this and soon I had music being copied from the NAS to the Titan. I did not time this but it probably took ten hours over the network. That’s about 2TB of stored music. The downside is that Roon now sees all my music as new. I can live with that. It might actually be a god thing as I tend to listen more to music I have recently added as opposed to the stuff I have owned for years.
So how does the new Titan perform? All I can say is that there is no comparison. The new Titan is so much faster than the QNAP NAS. All actions happen very quickly. Go to Qobuz? Snappy. Go to Tidal? Also very fast. Load and album and hit play. Bang, it’s there. Is there and upgrade to the audio quality? Too early to say. Today is Sunday and the Titan arrived on Thursday afternoon so it’s really only been a day or two. Am I happy I made the change? YES!!! I use Roon every day. I have for 10 years. One more thing. ARC has never worked for me. It works now. Flawlessly. The first time I tried it. I didn’t like spending this much money on this but if you put aside the cost this is a very worthwhile upgrade. I plan on keeping this box for at least as long as the 10 year old QNAP so if you take it over time the cost is not that bad. Music is my main hobby so the cost was not a factor in my decision. Would I do it again? Yes, yes yes. I am delighted and the box looks just great. I was able to place it next to my audio system and ran a USB cable from the Titan to my DAC. I am looking forward to comparing the output to my Auralic G2.2 Streamer.