Hi all - I’m looking to put internal storage into my Roon Nucleus so I’m looking for a 2.5" form factor drive, up to 2 Tb in size. The Samsung 860 Evo seems to fit the bill. Anything I need to watch out for when buying SSD drives ?
TIA
James
I don’t know about Roon Nucleus but the EVO 850 is what Naim recommends for the Uniti Core and the EVO 860 is its replacement now the 850 is discontinued.
Best
David
Do Roon have any suggestions? Their forum is pretty well used, although I find it a bit odd that the Nucleus has no proper web page with a full description, specs etc.
Yes a bit sparse on specs apart from drive height. I’ve ordered an 860 so thanks David.
James
I suspect that some of the performance of the Nucleus vs. running a Roon Core on a NAS is that it has nothing noisy in the box aside from the bare essentials. Adding an SDD could degrade performance if I’m right, and that’s aside from any size limitations if you have a large hi-res library. Box count aside, an external drive solution that’s self powered could be a better bet…
I did wonder if that may be the case, but it sounds fine. Initially it sounded rather harsh and I was a bit concerned that adding the internal drive had caused the issue but it turned out that I’d forgotten to turn off the server whilst importing music to the new drive and it had got itself into a bit of a strange state - working but very unresponsive. Rebooting fixed it and it’s all sounding rather good.
Roon continues to exceed my expectations and has been well worth the investment in hardware and licence.
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I’m running the Samsung 250GB EVO NVMe’s in my NAS and they are super reliable so far - running 24/7 for over a year.
I have a Samsung 860 SSD in an external case and use via usb for my ROCKs music store not noticed any sq differences to the previous HDD. I also notice no difference when I used my NAS previously it’s just a bit quicker being local I find.
Does the Roon Nucleus store music files? Someone told me it doesn’t and it’s just for the software.
As standard it only holds the OS and database on the factory fitted SSD. You can add an extra internal drive to store music.
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Cool, and thanks. That’s what I thought. I am thinking about getting one and adding a 4 GB SSD, but I was told elsewhere the Nucleus doesn’t store music. I since checked the online manual to determine it in fact does, with an extra drive, as you confirmed.
Yes the Nucleus is a nice neat solution. I’m really pleased with mine.
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I plan to upgrade to a ND5-XS2 or NDX2. In the meantime I have a ND5-XS which is not Roon ready. Is there anyway for my to use Roon/Nucleus with the ND5-XS? I have the Chromecast Audio dongle, if that helps.
To answer my own question it looks like I can use a Raspberry Pi or the Squeezebox Touch I already have as a Roon Bridge to the ND5-XS.
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Yes, there a some Roon ‘bridge’ options. Depending on how long you intend to wait before upgrading your streamer, the simplest and cheapest way to get Roon on the old streamer you have would be to just use the Chromecast Audio you already have, or an Airport Express, via optical in. Probably not optimal for sound quality or Hi-Res support, but it will allow you to get Roon up and running while saving the cash for the streamer purchase.
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I’m going to try the SqueezeBox Touch as a Roon Bridge. Then I have support for the 24/192 high res files on my NAS, with the Roon Core running on a Mac Mini.
Your Touch will work without any fuss. Just ensure your enable Squeezebox support in settings and Roon will then advertise itself as Logitech Media Server to your Touch. You can also add the ChromeCast elsewhere and have another endpoint.
You don’t need to fit an internal drive to nucleus either for the music store you can add a usb external drive or just add a network share from another computer or NAS.
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No, but depending on how I set things up it might be tidier for me. I’m not uncomfortable doing such surgery.
It’s a 15 minute job to fit the drive and it does make a very neat solution. The silent black box now does it all and my Melco server will be heading off to its new home tomorrow.
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I think I’m going to hold off on a Nucleus. I like the idea of a drop dead easy solution. However, I have a 2012 Core i7 Mac Mini that I don’t use much (I also have a 2018 MacBook Pro for every day use). I am going to repurpose it to run Roon Core and use my existing NAS. I will probably upgrade it with a larger SSD. It has the original 240 GB one. I might still upgrade the NAS to something more modern, mostly because I want something I can deploy Docker containers on.