Why does ROON ROCK need to be on an M.2 SSD drive

[Geoff_Coupe]

It’s the fact that Roon needs an SSD for its database for performance reasons, and since the M.2 SSD is the default drive in an NUC, that’s what is used for the ROCK OS and Roon.

More info about the software design of Roon and why SSD performance is required is in Brian’s post here:

Suggested hardware

It feels like the answer to most “will it work?” questions is going to be “It’ll work, but it won’t be as good as it could be”, because lets be honest, no-one is going to wonder whether a Mac Pro works flawlessly or not. I want to expand a little bit more to help you guys understand where the tradeoffs are so you can make good hardware decisions. As we’ve said above, Roon will run on just about anything vaguely recent. How much hardware you need to get an impeccable experience depends on how yo…

You also can’t have the ROCK OS and Roon held on the same drive as your music, hence if you’ve got an internal drive in your NUC holding your music, you will also need a separate M.2 SSD for ROCK and Roon.