Article: Review | Running a Large Roon Library on a QNAP TVS-872XT

[Kal Rubinson]

Nice report.

 

It might be useful to supplement the comments on how well this NAS and its cpu handle your complex tasks, including DSP, with the numbers from Roon's assessment of the processing headroom.  This will indicate current throughput relative to the instantaneous demands of the task.

 

I did not see any reference to functions such as up/downsampling and/or format conversions and, unsurprisingly, no attempt to use more than 2 channels such as for bass management or multichannel.  These are the things that might stress an "Core i5-8400T running at 1.7 GHz."

 

 

 

 

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[Kal Rubinson]

The most stressful test I've used involved high resolution, DSP and multichannel. "Only with the easy configuration at DSD64 did the headroom rise above "1.5x" and give continuous playback. Adding the convolution processing, it shrank to "1x" and played only some of the time. With DSD128 and DSD256, the headroom was always less than "1x" and playback was riddled with interruptions."  Convolution filters were more stressful than PEQ.  The illustration below is with the (unspecified) i7 in a Nucleus+.

[Kal Rubinson]

9 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I just added parametric EQ for the heck of it and the QNAP didn't even blink. 

Good but at 2x or less, there is little margin left in the tank.  Note that, at what Roon thinks are desirable rates, the processing speed is replaced by the friendly star. 😉

EDIT:  If the NAS does any housekeeping work in the background or is accessed for another task, the tank may run dry. 

9 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Looks like the only thing that will likely phase it is multichannel.

Agreed.  So if that trebles the workload, it will likely cut the processing speed to 1/3.  So, 2x becomes less than 1 and will fail.

[Kal Rubinson]

2 hours ago, bbosler said:

Try a Lynx Hilo.  If you have the right software you can  use the 3 analog outs (headphones, line out, monitor out) as a 6 channel DAC. Pure Music crossover can be configured to use them that way so you can triamp.. not sure about any surround software that will see them separately, but I know very little about surround software.

For less than that, you can buy a Merging Anubis and, for much less, an OKTO DAC8 Pro.

[Kal Rubinson]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

Rebooting your NAS is not a solution. Roon is a memory / CPU hog regardless of the platform. This needs to be addressed by the Roon developers.

Indeed.  The same tasks that strain the CPU under Roon generally run easily under JRMC.

 

1 hour ago, bobflood said:

Just curious. Can an adult live long enough to listen to 10 TB of music?

 

Probably not but I can't decide which TB I can't live without. 🤞

[Kal Rubinson]

38 minutes ago, Yop1403 said:

in general, the hardware of QNAP is great (they are using pretty recent CPUs), in regards to software I find them a bit crappy. Had my old Synology run over months without a need to restart. That‘s definitely not possible on my QNAP, needs to be restarted every ca. 2 weeks – everytime it starts to slow down and lag with certain tasks...

I am not a technician nor do I run Roon on them but my 4 QNAP drives never need to be rebooted except for system updates.

[Kal Rubinson]

13 minutes ago, LarryMagoo said:

I haver never understood people with ridiculous sized libraries.  I have a measly .5 TB and I have stuff I don't remember buying.  How in the hell do you listen to 10-21 TB????     You could not possibly listen to that much music in any ONE lifetime!

And how big are your files?  Much of my collection is high-resolution, multichannel and uncompressed.  Some of the individual tracks exceed 10G!

[Kal Rubinson]

1 hour ago, ted_b said:

Kal, yes And as I joked earlier wait til we turn Chris into a multichannel guy. His 10TBs goes 25 in a hurry. 😀

Yes.  It is simple math.

[Kal Rubinson]

1 hour ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Most definitely a first world problem, but one that can be avoided. The user just has to weight the pros and cons of going with a specific OS and storage model.

???  I am running win10 on two different systems and both have QNAP NAS drives in them.  Roon always adds new content automatically.

[Kal Rubinson]

1 hour ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I'm not making it up. I've talked to the Roon guys about it as well. 

I am not doubting you.  My suspicion, though, is that it is not problem due to any particular hardware or OS but, rather, to some obscure and probably accidental communications mismatch.  Such is beyond my depth of knowledge and I'd attack it, if I had to, by stripping everything down and apart and reinstalling everything, hard and soft.

[Kal Rubinson]

2 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

It’s an OS limitation. Nothing I or Roon can do. Many people have the issue. 

Are all people with the same OS having this problem?  If not, it ain't the OS, per se.

Wait.  Are you referring to the OS on the QNAP with the core on it?  If so, the question remains although the sample population is much smaller.

[Kal Rubinson]

2 hours ago, bluesman said:

Act in haste, repent at leisure.

Act in haste, repent post mortem.  

[Kal Rubinson]

1 hour ago, bluesman said:

Wise words, my friend. We grow old too soon and smart too late.

That implies that I am old.  😎

[Kal Rubinson]

On 9/19/2021 at 9:59 AM, The Computer Audiophile said:

I just converted my TVS-872XT to QuTS Hero with ZFS. So far so good. 

Can I assume that there is no seamless migration of the data from one OS to the other but that one has to actually reload it from a back-up?

[Kal Rubinson]

11 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I believe that's what I did. But, I really don't remember.

I am glad that you do not remember because the process seems daunting:

Quote

Due to the differences in file systems between QTS and QuTS hero, it is not possible to migrate directly from a QTS-based NAS to a QuTS hero-based NAS, the NAS need to be reinitialized to switch to QuTS Hero. 

Importent: Before changing to QuTS Hero, you will need to back up all the data on a different storage media, because the reinitialization process will format the drives.