Seems to be much concern with running Roon on NAS, but I’m very happy with my setup which has many advantages over non-NAS solutions such as NUC, Nucleus or whatever else.
My setup is: (1) Synology DS218+, containing (2) 2 x 10TB Seagate IronWolf (NAS SATA 6Gb/x NCQ 256MB cache) internal hard drives, and alongside a (3) Glyph Atom 275 external SSD via USB. Per Roon’s advice, the Roon core is installed on the external SSD drive, and the library lives on the internal drives. This has been very easy to set up, performing flawlessly, and supports about 20 users accessing a large music library on an endlessly-varied array of playback platforms.
BIG advantages to this setup are:
- Its not limited to hosting my music library. It also hosts a movie library, a TV library (and DVR), a home video library, an audio book library, and a photo library (all via Plex), as well as computer backups for everyone in the household.
- The music library is available OUTSIDE my home network to me and my friends and family (also via Plex).
While I’m a huge fan of Roon as a front end for the music library, its got 2 big limitations: (1) it’s music-only, and (2) its not available outside my LAN.
I like to listen to my music library in my car, and everywhere else – not just at home on my LAN. I also like to share my music library, and other media libraries, with friends and family.
I’m very thankful to Christopher Rieke for creating the ability to run Roon on my Synology NAS. He provides a VITAL service to the Roon community. I wouldn’t be a Roon subscriber if I couldn’t run Roon flawlessly on my Synology NAS.
And finally, a note about redundancy and library management. Although iTunes is no longer a feature-rich library manager, it inspired other softwares that are; like Swinsian, for example. For metadata management, large scale tagging, and general house-keeping, Swinsian is now (due to the demise of iTunes) my library manager of choice. I like to house a main “working copy” of my music library on my laptop – so that I can add and delete music and manage metadata wherever I am. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to automatically shift all library changes to the Synology-bound copy of the music library each night. Again, this is a work flow made dead-simple by the presence of an excellent NAS OS like Synology.