I’m thinking of breaking down and buying a NUC10i7FNH to run ROCK for a very large music library. I’m would need to get a new external drive because my present drive is thunderbolt 2. I’m unsure whether a NAS or a DAS would be better. It seems like the NAS choices, like Synology really have more useful features like SHR and there just don’t seem to be as many DAS units out there. I was interested to here from any members of the community who had views or recommendations on this. Thanks.
Please read through the thread linked below, where this and more has been recently discussed:
Note: If you need more specific advice, it might help if you could better define your “very large music library” (give some numbers).
I would fit a large internal drive (SSD if you’re after quiet) and make sure it’s well backed up. Second choice, stick the drive in an external USB housing - but big ones need a PSU, cables, mess, etc. Unless your “very large library“ exceeds current drive offerings, a NAS would not be a consideration for me personally - too much network traffic, something else to manage/look after, another point of failure, etc.
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Thanks,
I think my question must not have been clear enough
I would put roon on a nuc, not on a nas.
I would have my music files on an external drive and i was asking for views on going with a nas or a das for that
Large external USB drive.
I use a Seagate 8tb HDD.
Although some here have had problems or know of reported problems with Seagate drives.
But really any decent brand of large USB HDD should do for music storage.
For this operation I prefer HDD to SSD.
Ymmv
Don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be 
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The recommendation is clearly for local storage (this includes also DAS solutions).
This decision is already questionable if your library is really very large. But no one is able to tell without real figures.
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Thank Blackjack
We’re talking about 700k tracks
I have it on a mini mac with 32gb ram and experience intermittent problems
I though a dedicated nuc with ROCK was the best solution for large libraries?
I run ROCK, but I have all my music on my NAS for storage and backup. If you have a good Ethernet setup, I found that this works great. The other option is to have a very large 4/8/16TB drive connected directly to a NUC/ROCK for best performance, as noted above.
I don’t know about your intermittent problems. CPU wise the NUC seems to be less performant than your current Mac Mini though. But maybe your current issue is more related to the use of mono on the Mac platform and things will work out for you.
So your Library already got demoted from very large to large? 
IIRC I already saw a staff post reporting a Nucleus(+) or ROCK setup being used for a 1’000k tracks library. But this is not helpful without all the details about the setup. As there are other users with libraries your size and up regularly on the forum, lets see what experience they can share.
I still want to ping @support to see if they can comment on your proposed use case or bring in a tech guy to comment.
A slightly tangential but related question. I have music data that’s quite large—5TB last time I checked—but only 14k tracks because they’re 99% classical and jazz.
So from a purely library management point of view Roon shouldn’t need much resources—RAM or processor on the NUC—correct? This is assuming you’re not doing convolution, and other compute-intensive processing that Roon can. Just library management.
@number6mi, as @BlackJack pointed out, NASs do bring yet another variable into your setup—the local network—that is possibly another point of failure. We’ve discussed this on the thread he referred you to.
The only reason that I can think of that a NAS could be helpful is if you want to jerry-rig a mechanism with which to access your music from outside your house. Although you could do it probably with a computer/NUC+DAS too.
If you decide to go with a RAID NAS or DAS, make sure you have a backup of your data. As was pointed out in the other forum, data redundancy through RAID-1/5 will solve local hardware failure issues, but not other issues like human error.
Yes but the processor still shouldn’t be a snail (something that meets the minimum specs (Core i3) preferably).
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I did just this (same NUC model) for my 170k tracks library about 6 months ago , I added an internal 4Tb SSD , it depends a lot on track size , my library has a lot of classical hence a track can be large track size relative to a Rock/pop file.
The alternative is a USB3 external drive but as been pointed out above they are externally powered, messy and can be a bit noisy and show vibrations. I had one connected to my streamer years ago and I could hear the vibration from my listening position. That said the NUC can situated anywhere miles away from the listening spot. (EDIT I have 8 x Seagate drives , 3and 4 Tb , for backups of my various libraries and have never had ay issues other than bouncing one of a tiled floor !!)
The Rolls Royce would be a 8Tb SSD (if a 4Tb is too small) also for that many tracks , MAX out the RAM . I put 32 Gb in but you can go up to 64 . RAM is cheap relative to the rest of the NUC/SSD
Whatever you fit match it with 2 external USB for Backup , yes I am paranoid 
so i was looking at a NUC 10 i7 and wasn’t going to mess around with any potential memory limitations or size limitations so was going to put 32 gb ram on it and a 500 gb ssd drive
The 500gb will be the M.2 system drive which once created will not allow you to use any excess space. So 500 is really a waste but its probably the smallest you can buy these days. Even with a big library your Roon Db usage will barely use 10% of that drive if that.
Its the “do it once and do it right” advise .
Thanks Mike,
The sad thing is my library is 20 tb so a single ssd on the nuc is not an option and i’m looking at 5bay raid options. Sounds like most think a DAS would be better to avoid network complications. The thing is when i look at DAS and NAS options, there are just not that many companies making DAS compared to NAS anymore and the features/tech doesnt seem to have moved on much from 10 years ago for DAS. I just dont see any DAS comparable to say a Synology 1520, set aside the network vs direct attachment difference. Other views welcome.
Western Digital sells the My Book Duo with up to 36TB capacity (without redundancy).
There is a QNAP 4-bay DAS enclosure with RAID support in the other thread and you can get professional (24/7 and RAID certified) HDD drives with over 20TB capacity to put into.
I’ve been looking at this more. I use apple music to add music to my library and get the native meta data right before roon does it’s thing. If it wasnt that, it would be j river or similar.
Anyway if i connected a DAS to the ROCK NUC, i’m assuming i could no longer practically or easily access the library with apple music to use it to add tracks to the library or edit them. On the other hand, i’m thinking this would be no problem from my mac with a NAS.
The only other thing i could think of was if a had a DAS connected to my mac and the mac and nuc are connected to the network via ethernet cables, could the nuc access the DAS?
I’ve really appreciated all the commentary from everyone and so look forward to hearing commentary on the above.
I have recently been trying to improve my Roon experience, I was having a lot of issues with speed and general stability.
I have a MacBook Air as the core machine and was using a NAS to store all of my music (tiny in comparison to yours). Both hard wired into a Nighthawk router.
Some things that made a massive difference:
- Switching from NAS to an SSD attached to the core
- Setting the DNS to 1.1.1.1
- Scheduled restarts, in the latest Mac OS I set my core to restart everyday at 4AM
These three changes have made a massive difference, I no longer have a lot of the issues I had before:
- adding albums was slow and would sometimes fail
- loading is way faster for network elements (suggested albums etc)
- stability has improved, my Mac before was having instances in which it would max out available memory and overheat
So to your question, from my experience, the direct option is preferable.
May be different if you are now moving to a NUC.
On the not being able to access the drive, I think you can setup file sharing on your mac. Haven’t tried it though:
I have a large music library over 5tb in size, A couple of years ago, I had a hhd failure, all the music in that hard drive was lost. Thankfully I had upgraded from a smaller hdd to the larger one and was able to recover most of my music. Lesson learned. I got a NAS that has a mirror layout and if any such thing were to happen again, I would not loose my music. QNAS has an app that makes it be a Roon core and in my case, it runs without a hitch. A NAS with an intel multii core processor would work well, I think it is worth it if you have a large library.