New Router, New Streamer, New Questions

In my experience, anything larger than maybe 1 or 2 TB worth of music really needs a dedicated server of some sort. Many of the "streamer" or "network player" devices (which is how Cambridge describes the CXN100) can accept USB drives with a moderate amount of music on them, but really aren't powerful enough to handle a larger library. 

Something like a Lumin, or maybe Aurender, Auralic, or Innuos Zen would do a vastly better job of dealing with such a big library. 

The other option is to check out Roon. You would run that on a different computer (either a dedicated server or just an existing computer on your network that you leave powered on all the time) and it handles all library management, album art, etc, then streams to your CXN100 over the network. Much much smoother more enjoyable process in my experience, although it has an extra cost and have a bit of learning curve to it. Once it is running I find it so much better than any other dedicated sever though, even the good ones like Innuos. 

There are 2 issues here 1) the time it takes to build the file index and the scalability of the device doing the indexing. A 500GB Disk will take half the time a 1 Gig disk to build the index. 2) the file index takes room - memory in the router. Your amp was not really designed as a file server. The designers undoubtedly allocated some resources to support the USB port, but I'm pretty sure supporting Multi-Terabyte disk stores was out of scope. The solution is either NAS Ethernet storage which is designed to accommodate large storage volumes or a dedicated media server.

Either way, I hope you have taken steps to protect your investment in time and effort in building that library, by mirroring the disks or by configuring a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) so that when a disk fails, the array can rebuild itself. 

Thank you all so much for you council and advice. I have decided to  try Roon and so far, I am very impressed. It ate up that huge library and was ready to go in about 2 hours. It was so easy to set up I was amazed. I had heard about Roon and how much it can do, I incorrectly thought I had to be really networking savvy. Nope, Roon did it all for me.

As for this huge library, I appreciate the advice regarding backing it up! I do! I actually have 2 physical back ups stored at 2 different locations.

Thanks for your help!

Let's go listen to music!