I have a Nucleus with a 2 TB HDD drive attached via USB, working fine. I just installed a WD 2 TB SSD internally to the Nucleus, and formatted it, and am now copying files from the HDD to SSD.
I am using the Network access file explorer function on my PC (attached to the home network that Nucleus resides on). I selected about 500-600 album folders to copy (~5000 files), and initiated the copy process using copy/paste. The problem is that the file transfer process is very slow, even though I am copying from a USB HDD attached directly to the Nucleus, to the SSD internal to the Nucleus. Is there any way to speed file copying? Right now the speed is about 3 to 10 Mb/second, or about 100 files per hour. I looked at similar threads, but they don’t seem to address this somewhat standard situation. Another post has suggested that the copied files are all being routed through my WIFI connected laptop when I use the Network copy function. Possible? How can I copy directly from the Nucleus HDD to the Nucleus SSD?
It is a WD 2TB My Passport, with USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 capability. I also seem to recall formatting it for exFAT so I could copy my Mac Mini music files onto it. But even USB 2.0 allows for 60 MB/sec transfer speeds.
Danny, that explains a lot! Many thanks for the feedback. I was not familiar with the SMB aspect of Nucleus/ROCK design, so I hoped I could make a direct file transfer at the Nucleus device. But you note that is not possible given the architecture. It would be good to list this advice in the manual, or a manual FAQ, because I suspect that many folks, like me, will initially use an external HDD, and then want to migrate to a SSD for their Nucleus. It sounds like the best/fastest way to transfer files from a HDD to a SSD is to directly attach the HDD to my laptop, and for that laptop to be connected via ethernet (and not wifi) to my home network so the files can move more quickly to the SSD in the Nucleus. Thanks again!
I just tried the method I described in the post above (USB 3.0 HDD connected to laptop which is connected via ethernet to house network that Nucleus with SSD resides on) - as recommended by @danny . Wow! I just increased from less than 5 MB/second file transfer speed to over 90 MB/second file transfer speed. What was going to take days is now reduced to a few hours…
BUT – I’m in the same boat. Got through exactly the same last weekend (you might recall).
I have a 1TB SSD (Samsung 950Pro) as internal storage and I have and 1TB SSD (Samsung T3) connected via USB to the Nucleus.
Copying ca. 500 GB from my Mac to the USB-SSD connected to the Mac takes ca. 0,5 hours.
Copying ca. 500 GB from my Mac to the Internal Storage of the Nucleus takes ca. 7 hours.
Copying ca. 500 GB from attached USB to Roon Internal storage takes ca. 20h (?!? – stopped).
What’s the reason there is no copy/sync tool for a direct/fast transfer of files from USB to InternalStorage (0,5 h from my Mac to USB plus another 0,5h from USB to Internal storage).
That would be great – and a real time saver when importing large libraries.
The WIFI is the bottleneck, even in the case of an USB drive connected directly to Nucleus. The files will always be sent from the USB drive first to PC/MAC and then from the PC to Nucleus.
I solved that problem by connecting Nucleus‘ ethernet cable directly to the PC‘s ethernet port.
File transfer from the PC‘s internal storage via ethernet cable directly to the Nucleus‘ internal SSD was super fast. Even files from an external USD drive, connected to the PC, should be transferred pretty fast this way (as long as you use USB 3.0).
Going from Wifi to wired Ethernet (Gigabit) does improve copying speed. BUT this is still far from a local copy that would happen between the USB-Port of the nucleus and the internal storage (disk). I would really, really prefer if Roon would provide a copy scheme that’s bound to the Nucleus and independent from the Network. Taking about audiophile hardware Naim does just that on the Uniti Core and Melco does this with all they models – for the more IT biased folks QNAP does provide a full set of tools (QNAP and 3rd party) for synchronisation/copying/backup to avoid the network bottleneck.
Is this still the case (better to attach USB SSD to laptop and from there copy to SMB vs. attaching USB HDD to ROCK and copying because network involved twice?
It’s still the case. A copy/music backup function has been requested as part of the forthcoming Roon OS 2.0, but whether that will be included or not, we don’t know.
One easy and relatively slow way:
1- Reformat the internal SSD from the web interface
2- Use a sync utility like Chronosync to sync your drive to the internal drive over the network
There really isn’t another way that is this simple in my experience. It is slow but with a synchronizer like Chronosync, it will work fine and successive syncs take very little time as it checks for diffs
The better but more technical way:
1- Reformat the internal SSD from the web interface - disk format will be ext4 (the best format!)
2- Remove drive and mount it on a linux machine
3- Copy files from one disk to another
4- Put drive back in NUC/Nucleus
I use the Chronosync method. Initial sync of my 3.5TB is slow, but once done update syncs are fast. I curate my library on my mac pro in my home office and then copy over to the NUC. Chronosync or similar is indispensable to keep backups (I cycle through 7 backups of my music library).
rsync is a cheap solution (free!) on mac, linux, surely there’s something similar for windoze.
