Roon Causing Constant NAS HDD Access

[jtconte]

Hi, I have not been on these forums in a long time. I have been working on our family room system, which is listed in my profile, and it is sounding very good given the restrictions.

I have been using JRiver MC for several years but wanted to try something else since I only use it for audio and it seems it is more for audio and video and other media.

I installed the Roon Core on a 2017 iMac (i7 4.2GHz, SSD, 40GB memory). My audio files reside on a QNAP TS-431P NAS. Installed Roon Bridge on the iMac mini which is in the family room system. Finally, installed Roon Remote on an iPad mini. All but the iPad mini are connected via Gb Ethernet. The NAS is located in my upstairs office while the family room is downstairs. The installations, library building and setup all went well and I was enjoying the Roon interface. A few days later I noticed that the NAS was being accessed every 10-15 seconds for no apparent reason. I could hear it while working in my office. No one was doing anything to access files on the NAS and Roon had not been used for 12-18 hours. I quit Roon on the iMac and about 30 seconds later the NAS access noise stopped. I went through some gyrations that, so far, indicate that Roon is causing this.

 

I posted about it in the Roon Community forum here: https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-causing-constant-nas-hdd-access/39937

 

A friend reminded me about this forum and so I was curious if anyone here has had this experience with Roon?

 

John

[ShawnC]

Roon could be analyzing all your files for volume leveling and DR rating. This can take a day or two if have over 20000 files. I’m not at home but you can check this in the setup menu

[jtconte]

Thanks Shawn but Roon was all done with its library building and file analyzing. Check out the link to the Roon Community forum I posted if you have several minutes to see the details of what has been done to diagnose this.

 

Unfortunately, my trial has expired with Roon and I canceled it because of this issue so I can no longer diagnose it further.

[jtconte]

Spoke too soon! Even with an expired Roon membership, it constantly accesses the NAS when launched. Persistent bugger.

 

 

[jtconte]

I’m back to using JRiver and glad the NAS is no longer being constantly accessed. It’s perplexing to me that so few consider this an issue. I say that because only one person has replied to this thread in a week. In my case, it involves a NAS but I suspect that it happens in all storage scenarios- internal/external  HDD/SSD. It’s not only a wear factor but possibly a sonic detractor. 

[cjf]

I must confess ahead of time for not looking at your Roon Forum post before asking this but.....

 

Out of curiosity, do you recall what you had the "Automatic Rescan Interval" set to within the Roon App?

 

I cant say that I've witnessed this issue personally to any extent that has caused me concern.

 

A few things come to mind that could be a cause of this but some of them are not Roon related per se. Something like File Indexing of the Music Share may "look" like a change to Roon causing it to recheck things but that's just a SWAG.

 

Its also possible that Roon is uploading things about your library for their own purposes (Big Brother...Heh) but you would need to dig into your Router/Firewall to find Source/Destination Addresses, Data Sizes and over which Port/Ports to prove that. I have seen activity in the past To/From Roon IP's on a fairly frequent basis in my own setup.

 

I never dug into though to make heads or tails of what they are doing. 

[bibo01]

I had this issue about six months ago with a Sinology NAS.

I reported this to Sinology and Roon support. On Roon forum you can probably find my thread on this issue. Both - NAS and PC with Roon - were fine on their own. Perhaps it was due to a Sinology OS update that somehow tricked Roon to keep scanning the library.

In the end the only way to solve it was to reinstall Roon.

[jtconte]

cjf, the Rescan Interval was 4hrs, which I believe is default. 

 

bibo01, I did not have the spinning icon in Roon, if I looked at the correct thread, that you did. Roon appeared to be idle and yet the NAS access was a constant.

 

I ran a utility, at Roon supports request, on the NAS to capture activity. I provided the full log to Roon support but never heard back from them. Here is a screenshot of just 1 page of the over 25 that were generated in just 3 minutes. And this is with Storage disabled in Roon. If I quit Roon and waited a few minutes before running this utility, it would not generate a log at all in 5 minutes.

 

I never tried uninstalling and re-installing Roon. I should have.

 

[jtconte]

Roon support posted a reply to my thread on their Community forum. Constant Storage checking is part of their design. 

[jtconte]

I have been thinking a lot about this over the past month. I really like Roon and want to use it. I looked at getting an external SSD for my iMac so I don't have to hear the constant storage access noise. I just can't seem to put aside the wear factor. Am I over reacting? Have other Roon users just accepted this and don't worry about it?

[davide256]

1 hour ago, jtconte said:

I have been thinking a lot about this over the past month. I really like Roon and want to use it. I looked at getting an external SSD for my iMac so I don't have to hear the constant storage access noise. I just can't seem to put aside the wear factor. Am I over reacting? Have other Roon users just accepted this and don't worry about it?

Have you logged into the NAS and looked at the actual drive utilization from Roon when nothing is playing? I'm betting your NAS background virus checker is causing more

disk activity than Roon polling. SSD's used in a NAS do wonders for eliminating HDD mechanical noise and reducing heat that causes higher cooling fan noise, ran mine that way

for several years doing UPNP streaming before I decided they sounded better used in a core Roon server feeding Roon endpoint over RAAT protocol. Love how Roon picks up library changes right away,  other programs you would have to force a rescan or wait some default interval for your music changes to show.

 

 

 

[jtconte]

8 minutes ago, davide256 said:

Have you logged into the NAS and looked at the actual drive utilization from Roon when nothing is playing? I'm betting your NAS background virus checker is causing more

disk activity than Roon polling. SSD's used in a NAS do wonders for eliminating HDD mechanical noise and reducing heat that causes higher cooling fan noise, ran mine that way

for several years doing UPNP streaming before I decided they sounded better used in a core Roon server feeding Roon endpoint over RAAT protocol. Love how Roon picks up library changes right away,  other programs you would have to force a rescan or wait some default interval for your music changes to show.

 

 

 

Yes, I have and it is Roon. Look at my post above that shows the log. 

[davide256]

15 minutes ago, jtconte said:

Yes, I have and it is Roon. Look at my post above that shows the log. 

Raw data doesn't tell you anything. Does your NAS support an application that tells you what % disk utilization is occurring? Synology NAS gives me this,

CPU and LAN traffic from which I can indirectly infer there is little disk access currently occurring.

 

[rodrigaj]

@davide256 You must have a different version of DiskStation. Here is my Resource Monitor where you can see disk utilization directly:

[rodrigaj]

I'm sorry, but I should have also mentioned that I am not a Roon subscriber. Perhaps one day... I've been following this thread with interest.

[jtconte]

First is without Roon running.

Second is with Roon running. That constant 2KB/sec. dotted line does not exist when Roon is not running.

They are both for about 5 minutes.

When I quit Roon and wait a minute, I have no more disk access noise every 10-15 seconds.

 

[jtconte]

1 hour ago, davide256 said:

Raw data doesn't tell you anything. Does your NAS support an application that tells you what % disk utilization is occurring? Synology NAS gives me this,

CPU and LAN traffic from which I can indirectly infer there is little disk access currently occurring.

 

 

So the fact that running an activity capture utility on the NAS generated no log in 5 minutes when Roon was not running but did generate a 25 page log in 3 minutes when Roon was running doesn't tell me anything? 

[davide256]

1 hour ago, jtconte said:

 

So the fact that running an activity capture utility on the NAS generated no log in 5 minutes when Roon was not running but did generate a 25 page log in 3 minutes when Roon was running doesn't tell me anything? 

Correct. Roon will poll the music file directory periodically on your NAS for anything new/changed. . This will be a frequent but very small disk read access request.

I suspect playing 1 album of music  would cause more disk wear and tear than 24 hours of Roon monitoring.

[davide256]

BTB 2kB/s is the data rate speed modems were running at before 2000... its insignificant. Consider that good mp3 transmission drives at least 320kB/s of drive activity

[jtconte]

So it is constantly accessing storage devices after all. I never said it was much data just that it’s constant. And those are Writes not Reads. So wear is not a real issue but in my case, I don’t want to hear it. I may go the external SSD route then.