I’m going to play with putting Roon on my QNAP, a TS-651. I am upgrading the ram to 8GB, and am planning to get an external ssd.
But I wanted some advice on what limitations my celeron chip will cause, as I know its lower than recommended, but reading up it seems to depend on what the core will actually be doing. I just feed it out to my Meridian processor.
Obviously I can have a go, but I’d rather not buy the SSD if I am going to be running a dead duck.
If you are doing no DSP or upsampling you should be OK. Also the fewer endpoints the better.
It will be limited in what it can do, so you won’t be able to make full use of Roons feature set, so in this way its not very future proof. If all your doing is playing to one endpoint and not using DSP likely ok. You won’t get the slickest performance and the larger your library gets the slower it will get, but it will work.
In addition, you will notice that the UI is rather sluggish. For example, browsing albums and switching between screens.
It’s certainly usable, but you won’t have the best experience (my first core ran on a Trurion with SSD and 16GB memory.)
I moved from a Celeron based Qnap TS-453Pro with 8gb of ram to an NUC and the improvement in general performance was very noticeable. I don’t us DSP and mainly play to one zone. This was on a library of 2800 albums.
I’d spend the money on an NUC (I went for 8th gen i3) and use the NAS to hold your music.
I used to run it on a TS-251+ when I was first trialing it and for a few months after. This was fine for a couple of zones (RAAT + Airplay at the time) so long as Roon was doing minimal/no DSP.
However, searches were slow, browsing was sluggish and import scanning was especially slow - all to be expected and described in a KB on the subject. I didn’t bother with an external SSD - just the internal HDs in the NAS (mirrors WD reds I think).
I have since migrated Roon to an i7 intel NUC (717BNH I think) with an m2 and a SATA SSD in it and 16GB RAM. This spec NUC is TBH utter overkill, but I got it for something else and ended up not using it as much as expected so it now runs Roon on ROCK.
Even if you went with an i5 or even i3 NUC, I would strongly recommend it. Everything is fast on it within the limits of what is done entirely locally, and easily supports multiple zones with heavy DSP (Room correction, EQ, up sampling etc) and very responsive browsing. I don’t do many imports, but those run very quick as well and also have a USB CD drive attached for CD ripping to one of the SSDs.
Thanks everyone. I’m going to hold off putting it on the NAS, and think about replacing my ageing tower media centre. (That’s what I currently have as a Roon core, but it also does my distribution/recording of the TV signal from a network tuner)
Both my Kodi NUCs are quite old and they struggle a bit, so I might rationalise and have a single powerful NUC running the tuner server, Roon and one Kodi.
As long as you are ok with doing that without ROCK then I would say go for it. Even on Windows it will make your nas look like molasses
I currently run my Core on Win10 but this is the machine I am planning to replace/ upgrade.
I have a question, I am new to Roon, yet I have the same model Qnap NAS as you, mine being a four bay, with 4TB each, however none of my drives are SSD. That being the case, I’d like to know where I should install ROON core? I have an 2011iMac 27 that has a 1TB Samsung EVO SSD, and 16GB ram; a 2014 MacBook Pro with an Intel core i7 and 16GB of ram, and 256GB flash storage; and a 2015 Mac mini with an Intel i7, and a 1TB hybrid drive. Which one of these would be the best choice, or should I opt to buy another Mac mini, with an SSD? Also, do I need to have SSD’s in the Qnap to ensure quick indexing of my music? Any information will be greatly appreciated, and I thank you in advance.
Highly suggest you build a ROCK. Easy to do.
I decided to build a ROCK. Other options that work are more expensive and overkill (eg a new Mac mini!)
@Isaac_Sykes you need power to do two things: send Roon info out to the endpoints, and index the database. The music itself can be on something big, cheap and slow - which is why a NAS is ideal for storing the music. So you don’t need SSDs in the NAS, but you do need an SSD on your core. Out of your current devices, the 2011 or 2014 devices would both be great, all depends which one you can free up easiest.
When I used my QNAP I installed a USB SSD drive. You install Roon using the QNAP App Centre and when you open Roon you can specify where the database resides. It’s then possible to choose the SSD for this.
You don’t need Roon on the SSD, just the database.
Having said all this I’d still recommend an NUC rather than the QNAP.