That is definitely the case as the TS-410e as well as all units I have listed are equipped with modern Celerons comparable in performance to Nucleus One. You have mentioned running roon on a pretty outdated Qnap machine, its CPU dates back to 2015 and was never a particularly strong performer. You absolutely cannot compare this.
As mentioned there are several fanless models available which are completely silent when equipped with SSD, as well as some CPU-fan-only units which I expect to create a similar level of noise compared to Nucleus One such as the TBS-464.
Absolutely a good idea to have updates and run malware scanner regularly. Just wanted to mention that you can set automated routines to perform these automatically whenever it is convenient for you, and with a modern NAS it would not affect roon performance while running updates or scans.
If you are afraid of ransomware or data loss I recommend to have an external backup regularly either on a USB drive or reserve a bay for a backup HDD which you can hot-plug after the backup is done. 3-bay models such as TS-364 are perfect for this purpose.
I guess you will find a lot of satisfied users of discontinued Nucleus models as it is the most convenient hardware to run roon on. Nucleus One is relatively fresh on the market but basically offers same ease-of-use and similar performance to modern NAS.
So the question is rather what do you want to do with your local library? Either copy it on an internal storage of a Nucleus One and hope for the SSD never to fail, or run it on a separate NAS to use all RAID, backup and memory monitoring routines. If you opt for the latter and you have to do the NAS maintenance anyways, I do not see much point in having a separated Roon Core offering similar performance.
Agreed, and as mentioned in the post I linked, there are some serious advantages to having your canonical database on a RAID 6 (or SHR 2 in Synology-land) configuration where data scrubbing can ensure you keep your precious collection bit-perfect.
There’s a lot in that post that applies to QNAP as well as Synology, so it’s worth a read despite the title. A good NAS is as fast at most things (with the arguable exception of a huge amount of DSP across many zones, which is an edge case) as any Nucleus, and has many more advantages.
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Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
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As the new models start shipping, you might also see some deals on second-hand Nuclei (Nucleuses?).
Just to chime in on that point, I’ve had a QNAP TS-451 for quite a few years, and it just went belly up. Won’t boot. Luckily I had a full backup of its contents on an external USB drive, or all that data on the expensive RAID array would be lost (assuming I’m not buying a replacement QNAP NAS, which I’m not).
So as you implied, they don’t last forever.
And replacing a bad one can be a LOT of work, and a LOT of expense, which one reason why I put my Roon Core on a ROCK years ago. Were I in your shoes, as others have indicated, I’d be looking hard at a Nucleus.
When I replaced my Synology DS918+ with a DS1522+, it took just over an hour from opening the box to up and running, fully operational. It was simple. Just took out the drives from the old unit and put them in the new unit. System did some upgrades, I reinstalled Roon, and was good to go.
Maybe you want to share which type of legacy Qnap and how big your library roughly was? As far as I am aware of their portfolio, there was no Qnap for home or semi-pro use 5 years ago which would be equipped with a suitable CPU for roon. Some high end or enterprise models were, but the powerful ones for home use being on par with a Nucleus One appeared only in last 2 years.
I was in the same position seeing my previous Qnap collapsing under the load, exchanged it for a current model and could not be happier.
Not really a surprise as this one seems to be equipped with a Celeron J1800 CPU dating back to 2013 not being a strong performer. After owning a much more modern TS-251D with a significantly more powerful CPU (J4025) which also started to cause problems I am surprised that yours was starting roon with over 100,000 tracks at all.
Of course a NUC is giving you a much much better user experience, but so would a current NAS with appropriate specs. After having worked with several Qnaps I would always opt for a model with latest Celeron generation such as TS-410e, TS-264, TS-364, TS-464, HS-264, TBS-464 or something pro-grade in terms of CPU.
Hi, I know you stated you wanted to spend less time fiddling with computers, but there’s really no fiddling here except for installing ROCK, which, by the way, doesn’t support the hardware I’m talking about here: I purchased and have been running (2+ years) a Lenovo Thinkcentre M920q i7-8700T with 16gb of ram ($100), added a Crucial M.2 PCIe 500gb SSD for ($50), and installed ROCK per the excellent instructions provided on the ROON site. I feed ROON from my Synology NAS (~55k HiRes tracks, use streaming services, and have experience zero issues.
I ran Roon on a QNAP TS-473 for a couple of years and it was flawless really. For reasons nothing to do with Roon, I wanted to re-jig various network components so I ended up putting Roon on an intel NUC (series 8), and moving my library to a much less powerful TS-431P.
I went for the NUC over the Nucleus purely because of cost. I got a fanless case for it so it makes no sound whatsoever, and there was a bit of faff to get it up and running but I haven’t had to touch it for several years now. No regrets! Once it’s done, it’s done!
In all honesty, it worked great before and after.
I’m not really sure if I’ve contributed anything useful in this post, but there you go!
Its worth keeping in mind overall requirements beyond Roon, i use a Mac mini M2pro to host my Roon server but they same M2Pro also acts as a Plex server and it will eventually do Bacch4mac. All my data sits on a NAS. If only Roon is required you really cant go past a NUC, there are also cases for the NUC that make them fanless if theyre in the same room.
