I have read that Roon will not work well unless mounted on a SSD rather than a HDD on a NAS with raid set up. How much degradation in performance? Do I really need to find a way to add an external SSD?
Your best bet is to give it a try. In my experience Roon can work quite well with regular spinning drives with a relatively small library. I used to run roon on my synology, and with less than 1000 albums it behaved reasonably well. But you will see a major bump in performance with larger libraries. My advice is to try it and see. If it works well, that’s great. If not, back up the library and run it off an Ssd. I suppose the qnap has a usb port where an external ssd can be connected. That should work great
I’ve over 2300 albums on my Qnap TS453. My Nas has 8GB memory, 4HDD (Raid 1) and 2*500GB SSD. The SSDs are configured as “Cache acceleration”. I guess the most used programs and files are stored by default in the SSD cache because the Roon speed is same as when it was installed in my core i7 4.2GHz (overclocked) desktop PC
I second the motion for “Just give it a try”. Everyone’s use case and environment is different. Everyone’s tolerance for delay is different. It’s not that it won’t work, it is that it might react slower to your queries, etc.
I also run on a Synology NAS 1019+ with spinning disks only, 8Gb memory and so far not used the SSD caches. 1000 CD library runs at an acceptable retrieval rate for me - relative NUBE but super impressed so far