Would you recommend Portable SSD or SATA III 2.5" Internal SSD as a main drive for Nucleus One?

Roon Software Discussion Nucleus
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Hi

I know this drive: Samsung 4TB 870 EVO SATA III 2.5" Internal SSD is highly recommended by lots of ppl here in ROON community. I’m curious if there are ANY advantages of a SATA III 2.5" Internal SSD versus a fast portable external SSD drive such as this one: Samsung 4TB T7 Shield Portable SSD for Nucleus One main drive?

I’ve been running my Nucleus One with my older Samsung 1TB T5 Portable Solid-State Drive connected to Nucleus with the USB cable without any issues. My library has grown and I need to upgrade to a 4TB drive - so I’m deciding between Portable SSD and SATA III 2.5" Internal SSD. Portable SSD is actually a bit cheaper even though the write speeds seem higher.

Thanks in advance.
Serafim

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I think this is probably a matter of personal preference. My preference is an internal drive for music and attach an external drive for scheduled Roon backups.

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Thanks! Is there a reason you prefer internal drive for music? Is it visual esthetic of having nothing connected externally?

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I prefer external drives. Besides storing music it can be a location for database backups. Internal cannot be used for database backups

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My ROCK/NUC system has both - an internal SSD for local music storage and a small m.2 SSD in an external case for Roon Backups. Music files are backed up separately.

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There’s room inside for a drive, so why not? I also don’t want a bunch of drives hanging off of the Nucleus. There is probably no functional reason.

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When I used ROCK, I used an internal SSD for my NUC/ROCK based Roon server. My reasons were entirely aethetic - nothing to do with the technical merits of one vs the other.

Based purely on technical merits, I would probably opt for external because:

  • There is a bigger choice of devices ranging from SSDs up to 8TB or HDD’s up to 20TB and beyond.
  • An USB connected external device can be used as a backup destingation as well as music storage whereas an internal storage device cannot be used as a backup destination.

I was able to make the internal storage work for me because:

  1. I only have a small local library of ~350 albums most of which are 16/44 (which easily fits within a 1TB storage disk).
  2. I am familiar with network addressed storage and so I have had no difficulty setting up automated backups to my NAS (in a separate room) which is in turn backed up to other location.

If my library required more than 4TB of storage (at which point SSD’s start getting expensive and 2.5inch HDDs are not readily available), or I was not confident with Roon Backups to network destinations, I would have chosen to use USB SSD based storage (My Roon Server is in my lounge which is my main listening room so I didn’t really want a mechanical HD chuntering away in the background all of the time.

Note: I know that 2.5inch formfactor SATA SSD’s can be found up to 8TB and similar formfactor HDD (which can also be used for internal storage) can be found up to 5TB.

Note also: Early in the year, I abandoned ROCK and adopted DietPi instead. I still use internal storage but now for different reasons irrelevant to Nucleus/ROCK users.

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Thanks everyone! Very helpful!

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Another plus for the external drive is that if you are transferring lots of music files you can more easily disconnect the drive and connect it directly to your computer to do the transfer (which would be much faster) instead of transfering over the network.

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good point @bearFNF thanks!

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Neither, I would always recommend an external multi-drive NAS for several reasons.

  1. Multi purpose- use to store other content such as video, photos and files as well as music.
  2. Easy to upgrade. Simply unplug a drive and plug in a new one - can be done live.
  3. Uses RAID technology to protect content. Can loose a dive or even two and nothing lost.
  4. Independent from ROON. You can upgrade ROON server without needing to remove and recover your music content.
  5. Absolutely no difference in sound quality (irrespective of what anyone tries to tell you)
  6. Can use a mixture of SSD and HDD to optimise performance
    I use a synology 6 bay system with but there are others that are equally as good.
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Only caveat I have for the NAS setup is dealing with fussy network security. It can drive a guy to drink some days… also, you have to have a NAS in the first place (obviously)…

Last recommendation would be to make sure that you have multiple backups of DB and music files, no matter which setup you go with.

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Interesting! Thanks, will look into it!

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Agreed, and backing up to the same disk installed in ROON were your music files are located is probably not a good idea

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Indeed, never rely on a backup of anything on the same disk.

I keep my music on an internal SSD on my Nucleus.
All my music is backed up to different network locations.
My library is backed up to those locations as well.

Those network locations can be NAS, computers or other servers you have.
An external USB disk (or multiple ones) is another possibility if you don’t have network locations available.

I also backup my music and library to an internet backup service, I use Hetzner in Germany but for the US there is BackBlaze for example.

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One more note on the backups I wouldn’t just rely on a program to "automagically’ do your backups for you. I have had issues with certain backup programs in the past where they weren’t doing what they should have been (or what I expected them to do) and the “backup” was either not done or was unrecoverable. So I also recommend doing manual file backups periodically to lessen the data loss.

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Wow! Thanks so much for all these tips! Love this community!

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So, my final recommendation is to order and install an internal drive for your local music files. Plug in your 1TB portable drive and set up your automatic Roon database backups. Last, but not least, backup your music files to another computer or somewhere safe, and call it a day.

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From all I have read, SSDs are not suitable for long term storage of data, so definitely back up your library to spinning discs.

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If it’s big enough, does it make sense to use a portable external SSD for a music backup, as well as a Roon DB backup?

Does the Nucleus make that easy to do? i.e. can it do an incremental backup, by itself, only copying new/changed files? [I have a One on order, but haven’t used one before]

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