Zima is average-good at branding and maybe styling and that's about it. The hardware is pretty much random ODM low power designs, but based on ancient 2016 era releases.
Maybe it's just a company in Hong Kong trying to offload old inventory, maybe it's something else (i.e. Intel SIPP), but I wouldn't recommend it either way, unless power is free and you really want to minimally reduce e-waste (which is what this is).
You can get practically any later generation for the same (or lower) price with the same (or better) features but higher performance. Even a 5W design from Qotom from the same era would be a better choice.
An example: an ODM has a X30G-N5100 which is a 4-core 4-threads based Intel SoC from 2021 with (LP)DDR4 support burst to 2.8Ghz and a TDP of 6W. Normally you'd not have them burn full power all the time and you're more likely to use 3 to 4W. It has modern features, modern security and mainstream support for all of it. And if that's too new for you, you can get a J4xxx or N4xxx series box for half the price of that zima, but double the performance.
But the selling point of this board is IO not CPU: 2X SATA, ePCIe and 2X NIC. You can run proxmox on it with TrueNAS in RAID1 and pfsense/opnsense in a vm.
It's not like that is a unique set of IO features, even for the SoC that is used it is somewhat sparse. Granted, bolting on more IO on such a low-end chip would have limited use, but SATA and PCIe have been rather common on small single board computers for over a decade.
As for what software you can run: you can do that on any PC, that has nothing to do with this board.
The processor is weak comparatively on the Zima. I think the minimum you want to be looking at is the current generation of Intel N-series. CWWK and Topton make nice options that have similar I/O, better networking. STH [0] has a good article reviewing.
It does have a PCI-e slot, which is unusual in competing products. But yeah, otherwise it's a matter of marketing particularly with the Zimaboard. Their new Zimablade is much more interesting; it's still old slow tech but they retained the PCI-e slot and dropped the price all the way down to $65 US.
It does, but it uses an unusual cable. There are tons of SBCs with PCI-e M.2 slots too. The neat thing about the two Zimas is they have a standard PCI-e slot.
I doubt the ODMs are incentivized to wrap up some e-waste, rebrand it, and introduce it to the market under a new cap like ZimaBoard. Is this common practice?
This is very common. It's mostly due to the long-life programs where a large surplus or older SoCs are available. It's also why there is a large amount of C3000 based hardware suddenly.
Care to explain what an ODM is for this of us unfamiliar with the term? I'm not finding any particularly clarifying search results from the terms you used, AFAICT it's just a very broad term for manufacturers of industrial controller boards, embedded "Box PCs," etc. and doesn't refer to any specific product category? The "box PCs" would be most analogous to this product, but the problem with those is as a rule they do not sell direct to consumer, and even if you do manage to find someone willing to sell you one they come with a generous B2B markup. But maybe you're talking about something else.
If you want low power, check out the N100 systems that are out now. They use like 3W. I bought the N200 from this deal recently and it's a great little machine that can handle a lot of Plex transcodes https://slickdeals.net/f/16934029-msi-cubi-n-adl-dual-nic-in...
It's interesting that these N100 systems can cost less than some of the Zima products. So for me, I don't see much of an upside of going with them.
N100 and N200 systems are perfect price/performance for small servers. I am running a 7-year-old N3710 fanless laptop right now and it performs well enough for a few tiny sites and a postgresql database. I am pretty sure we reached this point ten years ago but I was too numb to notice it but low power devices have become powerful enough to replace the dedicated servers that we were spending tons of money on twenty years ago.
Once you get objective about what you're using that home server for, this is so true. Ignoring things like crypotomining or $FOO-At-Home gamified compute grinding, the vast majority of home needs are met by the lowest end processors. The J4105-based mini-pc I have running VMware isn't annoyingly slower (tho to be fair is definitely not faster) than the 10 year old server it replaced, but uses a fraction of the power and makes no noise.
As I read through the article I came to exactly the same conclusion.
I have an N95 mini PC that was $195 CAD, which came with 16GB RAM and a 500GB NVMe. It will also hold one SATA drive. All in a single box, although it is slightly larger and has a fan.
The NVMe slot on the Orange Pi 5 I use also keeps that mess down to a minimum. Power + network and that's a finished setup.
Edit: There are a TON of options in this space now. The value of 10 year old eBay gear is questionable at best.
Although multiple SATA to USB3 cases should be a viable option too; I plan to build my next home server using one of them paired to a mini PC with lower power requirements than the one I use now.
While slightly bigger than those mini desktops, Asus and Asrock have recently released Intel N100 ITX motherboards. I have the Asus variant in a 1u short depth case and since theres no fan, its silent and capable of running some self hosted stuff at ease.
It is not true, N100 system consuming 30w at full load (or 15-25w if set in bios), and around 7-10w idle. Previous generation atoms systems were around 20w max. Even older systems like n3150 - 15w. Anything USB connected can add another 5-10w permanently.
The MSI isn’t fanless though. For a passively cooled N100 mini PC, look at the ASUS ExpertCenter PN42 or the upcoming Zotac ZBOX edge CI343. You’ll pay a bit more than for the ZimaBoard though.
Because home servers tend to be bursty on demand workloads.
If you doing something that is hammering a CPU at 100% 24/7, then you’d get a faster CPI to get the workload completed faster and you’d be back to having idle CPU cycles…
> Because home servers tend to be bursty on demand workloads.
Not all workloads can be "completed" by throwing hardware at them. The sort of thing this kind of hardware is ideal for is things like home automation.
I run Home Assistant on an Xeon ITX PC with a micro-PSU for example, it's at ~40-60% CPU and ~80% RAM (of 16GB) running inference on my camera streams, handling Zigbee and Z-Wave devices etc, running automations, handling all of the sensors for the doors, lights etc in my home. This isn't a bursty problem you can simply get a more powerful CPU for, the goal here is to keep power down and performance up because it's a constant load. A smaller, lower power micro-PC would save me a bit in energy costs if I wanted to.
For real work, people like me (us?) use real servers like you say; I run a Ryzen 9 12c/24t, AsRock Rack, 2 M.2 NVMe, HBA, 8 SAS bays, 128GB RAM, 6 GbE NICs, with dozens of VMs and containers on, a few Kubernetes clusters, and a bunch of services (git, Harbor, Argo, etc) it uses about 100-150W with my CPU downspecced to 65W TDP.
Now that's a system that has bursty workloads, but it's in a different class to these low power machines that "normal" home users are looking for.
> Now RAM on the other hand!
> Free RAM is wasted RAM!
60W might be right for an ancient desktop, but it isn't correct for at least the above microserver (2nd item). From rough memory, mine were under 40W (38W?) when the drives were spun up and active.
And likely isn't correct for the minipc (1st item) either, though I've not got one of those (yet) to measure it.
More reason to buy the kind of passively cooled mini PC people get as pfSense routers from AliExpress & co. You get Jasper Lake (2021) or even Alder Lake (2023) instead of the much older Apollo Lake from 2016. The only thing you really miss out on is the form factor and the PCIe slot.
I recently got one of those passive boxes with an N5105 for opnsense. But I found it ran pretty hot. I was able to replace the thermal paste and shim the cooler a bit to get it closer to the CPU (there was originally a huge gap they bridged with a glob of paste), and it lowered the temps a bit, but it still hung out around 60-65c afterward. I think that could be OK, but it still just felt too warm too the touch. I ended up placing a USB 5V fan on the outside of the case and now it sits around 40-45c which I'm more happy with. But now I have a fan running 24/7 running on my passive device.
At the end of this ordeal, I bought another machine (MSI Cubi-N with an N200) for cheaper than the Topton Aliexpress job, which includes an internal fan. The fan is super quiet and the build quality is way better. And it comes from a reputable manufacturer which I trust more to not load any weird stuff into the bootloader. If I could do it again, I'd probably try to make my Opnsense router out of an MSI Cubi N with an N100 or N200, in both cases it would have been cheaper, more powerful, and use less electricity than the Aliexpress passive one. The only possible hiccup would be non-Intel nics that the Cubi comes with.
Just some perspective from someone who recently bought a couple of these devices.
These machines are super attractive spec-wise for their cost! However, and maybe it's FUD, I don't really trust the power supplies or the firmwares on these units. I'd much rather pay for a system with a power supply that is UL certified and a system that, at least on the surface, has a much better chain-of-custody for processor firmware. I know I could replace the power supply with something UL certified, but that now means I'm contributing to e-waste needlessly. My eyes are currently peeled for a 12th-13th gen i5/i7 1L system in my price bracket, as between the heterogeneous cores to get solid power efficiency, the ability to drop 2x NVMe SSDs and a lot of RAM, and on some of them, even the ability to get 10 Gbit, I can hit my ideal performance per watt budget and take advantage of my NAS for high performance decentralized storage.
And I'm not a huge fan of the form-factor either, it gets messy once you've got your SATA connectors, power and ethernet.
Not suggesting Zima is the right solution, but ebaying dated hardware often isn't either for many of us.
Don't get me wrong, it's great there are people who can use this stuff and not pay disproportionate prices for electricity to run it; but much of the world isn't in that situation; maybe one day.
Yeah, that's fair. The first option there (HP ProDesk 600 G4 Mini) do seem to have a reputation for being noisy, though replacing the fan with something quieter (eg Noctua) seems to be what people do:
While comparing server prices it’s useful add 3-4 years of electricity cost of running it mostly idle 24/7. In europe new small power efficient SoC boards often win in such comparison over used socketed systems.
These machines and the ZimaBoard absolute bottom of the barrel cheapo NICs, which are the biggest source of issues for networking devices.
In my experience using all of these, if you want to have reliable networking, either use a Linux distribution that ships with the quirks needed for specifically consumer NIC hardware (like VyOS), or use a NIC that ships for the OCP platform (aka commodity hyperscaler NICs) like the i350.
Yeah...this really bites the folks that don't do a lot of networking and expect things to 'just work'. The forums are filled with threads that start with 'I have this weird bug/failure I can't debug...' that peter out with 'I replaced the NIC with a good one and problem went away'. Those crappy (looking at you, Realtek) NICs have all sorts of bizarre issues that the vendors clearly don't care about beyond 'works in Windows...ship it'. IME, if it's an Intel or Broadcom chip, you're probably fine.
> if it's an Intel or Broadcom chip, you're probably fine.
You'd think, but a good test is to punch into google "e1000e proxmox issues" or "i210 proxmox issues." You'll discover that in addition to i225 issues another commenter is talking about, the Intel NICs shipping on the USFF PCs also have catastrophic issues in Linux and Windows.
I have the Gen8 microserver from your second link and what I really like about it (besides the 4 bays) is that is has ILO. Whenever there is a boot issue or I need to reinstall I don't have to drag it out of my server closet onto my desk, find a monitor and keyboard to hook it up to (now that I think about it, I don't even have a VGA monitor anymore) just do basic BIOS or GRUB stuff. It can all be handled via the web interface and the HTML5 terminal works great. Biggest downside of this machine is the power draw, even at idle.
I couldn't find anything in the Zimaboard docs about it, but my guess is I'd have to find a mini displayport compatible monitor if I ever need to do disaster recovery of the OS. This especially becomes an issue with the eMMC, as you cannot swap it out easily like an SD on a raspberry pi.
Yeah, I have a few of the Gen8's too, and agree about the iLO. Especially with the "advanced" iLO option, which the BIOS doesn't check the validity of its license key... so you can just look for an iLO key using your favourite search engine and you're good to go. ;)
For fallback purposes I bought a VGA to HDMI adapter like this:
Not sure if that's the exact model I have (am in different location atm, so can't check), but the pictures in that listing look like the thing I have. It's worked fine in the times I've needed to use it.
Huh. I have one and found the iLO such a total PITA to try to make the thing boot from its primary disk, a small SSD, that I ended up turning it totally off.
I guess now I need to find a way to turn it back on again...
Yeah, it's useful once you've typed in an "iLO Advanced" (or similar name) license key to enable it. Findable online for free with any search engine. ;)
It's a home NAS. It has one user, me, and only 1 network cable. The faffing around with a console cable, separate from the network cable, and the inability to just point to a boot disk like an ordinary PC, were hugely irritating and drove me to shouting anger several times.
It never occurred to me that I'd want the wretched thing, let alone try to unlock more of it.
All I want is to say BOOT OFF THIS DRIVE without defining volumes or single-member arrays or any of that enterprise BS.
The main thing I use iLO for is the remote (full screen) console (inc keyboard/mouse) that it makes available over the network.
So, if I want to muck around with settings, change boot things (like in your case), etc, it's all doable from anywhere in my house via web browser.
Keeps things pretty straight forward. From memory, the default iLO password for each machine is randomly generated and printed on a tag attached... um... to the back (I think?).
But there's a physical switch you can set (inside somewhere) which disables the iLO login password. Less secure of course, but for a home environment that can be the right choice. :)
If you don't need a stupid amount of compute power you can find even cheaper alternatives.
I bought a used Asus Chromebox CN60 for $21, put $20 of ram(16gigs) in it and a $20 256 gig ssd. All in, ~$61 minus shipping and I have a small home server running CasaOS. Same as the Zima Board, I have it running Home Assistant, PiHole, a MariaDB instance & an image hosting website for my wifes project. It happily hums away running on a Cloudflare Tunnel.
It's excellent!
I had to set up my Cloudflare Tunnel manually but it has since been added as an app to the app repository.
https://github.com/IceWhaleTech/CasaOS-AppStore/issues/158
I'm doing pretty much the same thing with cloudflared on an Acer cxi2 (Ubuntu server). I just use an external enclosure with on old SSD I had and it cost me about $20 with 4gb of RAM.
The Lenovo Thinkcentre M720Q and M920Q have both an m.2 M key and an internal PCIe x8 slot you can stuff a GPU, quad gigabit or dual 10GbE into. No ECC though. Sells for about $100 on eBay for a decent one with PSU that is the same PSU as their laptops (Bonus if you're a Thinkpad user). You need a riser and rear bracket for the PCIe slot that can be found on eBay for like $25. I have a 6 core i5, 32GB RAM, a dual Intel 10Gb adapter and 2TB NVMe in mine. Idles at 19W which is 2W less than the rectangular trash can 10Gb Verizon router's 21W. Total build cost was around $200 for all used hardware.
The lenovo m720q is amazing little machines. I’m using it with a 2 x 2.5 gbps QNap nic and running OpnSense. It’s been almost a year and it has been rock solid as a router. Before I discovered the m720q , I had no idea that a 8 lane PCie slot was possible in a mini-pc that small.
I have a 4x1Gb i350 in my SFF EliteDesk and it can get quite warm. I've had to install an aftermarket small fan for peace of mind, since the case only has a CPU and a PSU fan which don't create any airflow over the extension cards.
How's a dual 10 GbE faring in the even smaller enclosure of those Lenovos? What's the noise situation? I wanted to switch my router and random home VM needs to an EliteDesk mini I have lying around but it only has a Gb port, so I was looking at thunderbolt 10 GbE adapters, but seeing how pricy they are, might as well get a new complete box.
I've yet to really beat on it but it's quiet for its size with a typical laptop like fan sound under load. The dual port 10Gb intel nic doesn't seem to add much heat though I purposefully went with an SFP card in order to use cooler running fiber SFP's (A copper SFP runs burning hot vs a warm fiber SFP).
A brand new dual port 10Gb SFP card costs like $100 USD. Used is far less. I also wound up realizing that when it comes to 10Gb, copper can be more costly than fiber and uses more power per port. So I only buy SFP+ gear so I can use one of many interfaces: copper, fiber, DAC, etc. Fiber and DAC cables are cheaper and use less power. I have a ~$250 USD 8 port Mikrotik 10Gb SFP+ switch and also bought a few cheap 10Gb mellanox SFP cards for my server, desktop and work bench PC for like $30 each off ebay (I use them in Linux and FreeBSD.)
This is passively cooled. Fans are likely to be the first thing to fail on a setup like this. Plus it is likely you are running 24x7, and so fans means dust gets inside and eventually will kill things.
I got a refurbished J4105 8GB RAM thin client for 40€, 2 m.2 SSD slots (though one required an adapter, and only that one is NVMe, so lets add another $15 for the adapter), passively cooled.
The case doesn’t look as nice, but still over 100€ difference for a slightly faster, slightly newer CPU. And while not officially, it does support 16 GB RAM if I ever decide to upgrade. It does not have GBe ports, so that is probably the biggest reason to go with this board instead, besides wanting the sleek case.
I find NUCs kind of just work for home servers, consume a very reasonable amount of power (10W idle, 90W at full load, ~15-20W average in my case), aesthetically very neutral, and run standard Ubuntu distros with zero hardware driver issues. Everything works out of the box with a vanilla install.
They're also available dirt cheap second-hand if you're okay with a generation or two older processor, and you can use an m.2 SSD inside the case without a dangling hard drive like I see with TFA's Zimaboard setups.
I have a couple of Dell versions similar to your first link, the Micro form factor. They are nice and compact, but they have heat issues. I have one running BlueIris security camera software and have to run it with the case off and an extra fan to keep it from going into thermal overload.
The next step larger systems are probably a better bet.
The author is using an IKEA Skadis setup which is pretty popular in the 3D printing community. There’s a bunch of prints available for it, highly recommend if you need a wall organization of some sort.
I actually have one, installed Ubuntu and Ansible-Nas on it. Here is me lsblk output: its supposed to have 32GB MMC space, I only got 14GB. I wrote them an email about it, they asked for confirmation of my order only to then ignore me.
mmcblk0 ... 14.7G
At and while I am at it, I can not access the docker services from LAN even though I can ssh into it and I can locally via w3m access the services like hemdall hosted thought docker. Any idea what may fix this?
These little boards are neat products but I think they tend to compare poorly to used “normal computers.”
If you want a Zimaboard system with 8GB of RAM, you’re looking at 200 bucks. You have to get the mid-range one just to get 4 cores.
I bought a used 2012 quad core Mac mini which also has 2 SATA slots for about half that price. It idles at 13W according to Apple, and the person who sold it to me already had it upgraded to 16GB of RAM.
This is a machine with the “Apple tax,” i.e., a higher resale value than a PC.
You can jump on eBay and have a blast with “HP EliteDesk” as your search term.
I have to admit, though, a PCIe slot on a system this small is nice to have.
My compromise between pre-built Thin Clients and SBC's was building my own Mini ITX PC. The 17x17cm form factor has just enough connectivity for the size, even PCIe.
The 2018 build came in at ~250$: Asrock J4105-ITX [1] + mini ITX case (with pico power supply included) + 2x4GB DDR4 + 128GB SSD. Runs ClearLinux and works perfectly 5 years later.
The 2024 Mini ITX build will probably feature an Intel N100, like the Asus Prime N100I-D D4-CSM [2] at around 120$ for the board itself, but I'm still looking into options.
Honestly, for me, total dealbreaker for a product like this. Not only will it never work with anything other than the original PSU, that PSU will likely fry anything else you plug it into.
Which is perfectly in spec. Feel free to email the USB Implementers Forum and let them know they are clowns and USB-C was a mistake.
USB-C simply describes a connector. USB-PD is one of many optional power over USB-C specifications you can use, or choose not to use. Heck, USB-PD v1 supports power delivery over USB-A connectors.
My understanding is that an in-spec USB-C power supply will supply 5V by default - then, upon negotiation with the client, can go up to a higher voltage.
In the case of the Zimaboard, this is basically a 12V barrel jack with a different shape. It just dumps 12V out on the pins with no negotiation or considerations of the client device.
I suspect if the downstream device was already 12V compliant, it might survive, but I wouldn't count on that nor would I be willing to test it.
USB-C must deliver a minimum of 3 amps at _at least_ 5V. If it delivers more than 5 amps it must contain a marker chip. The Zimaboard charger could deliver 4 amps at 12 v for 48 watt power delivery and be entirely within spec. (I haven't actually confirmed if this is what they do, so take it with a grain of salt)
This is incorrect. A USB-C power source can’t be in-spec if it doesn’t supply 5V by default. Other voltages or alt modes can be negotiated after that, but everything starts at 5V. This is defined in the base “ Universal Serial Bus Type-C Cable and Connector Specification”, not the optional USB-PD spec.
A common misconception, Wikipedia spells it out maybe clearer than I did: "A device with a Type-C connector does not necessarily implement any USB transfer protocol, USB Power Delivery, or any given Alternate Mode: the Type-C connector is common to several technologies."
The document you mention is the specification for implementing USB 3.0 on a USB type C connector.
That’s not correct. We’re USB-IF members, and I’ve read through large chunks of USB-IF specs. The spec I am referencing is the one that defines the actual connector. You cannot build a power source that uses a USB-C connector and doesn’t support 5V and call it “USB Type-C”.
Looking back I will give you that 5v is required for vconn.
> You cannot build a power source that uses a USB-C connector and doesn’t support 5V and call it “USB Type-C”.
Yet this whole conversation thread shows that is not the case. By not joining the IF you can do as you please.
A great example of this is the Ubiquti Theta cable (https://tinyurl.com/5asf8wpp) where they implemented a completely proprietary cable (as far as I can tell) with "USB Type-C" on both ends.
One thing I don't really understand about the Zimaboard is why it comes in such a good looking enclosure? If you want to use it with stuff connected to the PCIe/SATA ports you'll always need some extra enclosure/case anyway to keep things clean. At that point why not just ship a board like a Raspberry PI, etc?
> btrfs has had some issues in the past, especially with the RAID5/6 setup
I'm pretty sure that btrfs still has major issues with RAID 5 & 6, and that these RAID modes are not recommended to be used in anger.
Because the enclosure is the heat sink. It has to look more or less like that for functional reasons, and so making it pretty as well is no real extra cost.
It’s proprietary and easy mini homelab equipment for people who have an interest in home servers but not the time, skills or skills to setup their own.
Yes, I get that and I think it's a very cool device (given that it has sufficient IO for ones purpose).
What I don't understand is why the casing around the board itself is so well designed and good looking. To me it looks like a "finished" self-contained device on its own. But if you use it together with, say, 2 3.5" HDDs you'll surely need some enclosure around the enclosure. At that point an "ugly" Raspberry PI-style board would have been just as good.
Granted, OP makes good use of the board enclosure, but needs to DIY a case in order to do so.
I wanted to add the Odroid H3 here as well. I've got it running at 3~4W idle with a WD Black nvme m2 ssd. Standard x86 debian server installation. 16GB of sodimm ram (supports up to 64GB). 2x 2.5GbE ethernet. Passively cooled (fan optional). They sell enclosures with space for 2 disks. $129 (excl shipping)
What speed can you get over ssh to that board? The big issue I had with the Raspberry Pi 4 when using it as a low-powered server is when I run my backups to it over ssh, the network transfers top out at about 20 MB/s (just raw transfer speed going to /dev/null) vs. around 100MB/s I get on a regular x86 board.
I benchmarked it right now by copying a 6.1 GB file with scp from my laptop to the HC4 SSD. It eventually peaked between 77 and 80 MB/s (that's a B for bytes.) I have a 1 Gigabit interface and a 10 Gb/s cable so it reasonably saturated the interface. There were maybe another 10 or 20 MB/s to squeeze from it but I won't complain. It took 1m 13s.
The 10Gb NIC is actually an mellanox cx3 series with OCP connector, theretically you can replace it with some more interesting cards like cx5/6, or solarflare's
> There is no native way to mount the two SATA drives to the Zimaboard. The creators of the board do sell a metal bracket, but it doesn’t seem to integrate that well to the board.
Funny enough, I just had the ad for the ZimaCube pop up on Facebook (holds 6 drives, up to 164TB)
Looked interesting, though there are some inconsistencies with the core count for the "Octa" version. The intro blurb up the top says it's 12 core, while the spec listing further down says it's 10 core.
It's not clear if the ram is ECC either. With 6x SATA + 4x NVMe + 32GB RAM they're targetting more professional users, which should mean ECC ram is available.
---
Looking a bit more in depth, it doesn't look like any of their cpu choices support ECC:
I think the N100 specs there don't make sense. It says it'll have a PCIE 3.0 x 16 port, but the N100 chip only has a total of 9 lanes. Probably only applies to th 1235U version.
That "Chat GPT for all your files" sounds very intriguing. I have been looking for something like this that I could run locally on 4090, but haven't had much luck.
I think there is an over-focus on being fanless for silence and that leads to wandering down really niche sets of boards like this almost for the sake of looking for a niche board in itself. While it sounds extremely boring, a standard mini PC (called a "TinyMiniMicro" in this, Serve The Home phrasing) will almost always be a significantly better device, limit the fan speed to your liking (I typically go around 30 percent, can barely hear them with your ear up to the fan).
If your goal is to 3d print a custom case, mount things externally, and tinker these kinds of things that's great but I feel a lot of tech folks get caught up in "tinkering" needing to equal "the best option". I'm not saying there is anything wrong with tinkering, I've actually got a few devices mentioned like the mentioned Flashstor 12 and it's a lot of fun to mess with. At the same time, I'd sooner call them my dream tinkering devices than my dream home server.
I'm not sure that over-focus. Lots of small devices (especially older ones) don't have user-accessible fan speed control unfortunately and even if they do, fans degrade over time. I'm running one of the older NUCs as a home server right now and I'm really tempted to replace it with zimablade. Sure, I could replace the current loud fan, then play around with tweaks to slow it down while preserving the performance. But... I could just go passive instead. It's literally the opposite of tinkering too much.
Disabling the fan is too much work so you want to go to a board which requires you to come up with your own external drive mounting solution? Maybe we just have different ideas on what takes lots of tinkering, which is fair, as I'll take figuring out a software setting over building something or having external mount components.
I'd recommend something like a Beelink over an old NUC though. Tends to be cheaper than an old NUC for better performance and you can just set the fan speed directly in the BIOS on every model I've tried. The larger and thicker the fan the less likely it'll ever run into issues (or make noise in the first place) so cubes where the top is just a large fan work best. Boards with tiny fans are, somewhat unintuitively, very prone to making lots of fan noise over time.
> a board which requires you to come up with your own external drive mounting solution
I've got a tray it all lives on, so no attachments needed. Maybe a ziptie.
> Disabling the fan is too much work
Disabling would be easy, but I can't do that without frying it. Slowing it down means connecting the screen, rebooting into BIOS, adjusting the speed, restarting, collecting data, doing it again to check another setting, ... repeat many times, mounting it back every time. Then set up alerts on high temperature so that when the nearby heater kicks in during winter it won't overheat anyway. So yeah, it's a lot of hassle.
You hold some misconceptions about how CPUs work. Such a box grill not fry even if you disable a fan completely, throw it in an insulated box, and run it at full bore. Modern CPUs have a hard limit on performance but are most often soft limited by available voltage, amperage, or temperature headroom. As the CPU runs faster it runs slower to produce less heat and stay within its soft limits. Both passive and actively cooled CPUs operate by this principle. In both cases it's possible to prevent any heat transfer at all and the CPU will shut down, just disabling the fan on a mini PC outright won't cause that though.
Having even a tiny amount of airflow drastically increases the cooling capacity though. It's really quite remarkable by how much.
The setting procedure, as a result, ends up much simpler. You set the fans to a static speed where you no longer hear them. If that's off that's fine too, but having even a tiny something is a great help in getting more than the e.g. 6 watts of CPU performance headroom the Zimaboard has. If you're rebooting constantly or adjusting things based on season you've done something drastically wrong as my recommendation was set a static fan speed not tune the box for an overclocking competition.
I will admit you have to plug in a monitor... I will also say most consider that less tinkering than even just zip tieing their server and externally mounted drives to things :).
Again, I can assure this is as easy as I'm saying, no need to invent other possibilities, as I have some of the aforementioned boxes sitting next to me in this exact configuration. Some even beefier but dead silent, like 8 core 64 gb ram mini PCs with 3 drives and dual 2.5G nics running quite silently year round and a single trip into the BIOS (which you should honestly be doing even if you're not going to adjust fan speeds).
It's an "over-focus" on aesthetics, which in my opinion, legitimately matter the most for end users above all else. Every electronic category I can think of that Apple isn't dominant in already would improve immensely if all the players focused on aesthetics: e-bikes, displays, keyboards, mice, networking hardware, computer chassis, autos, ...
I've been running Zimaboard for the past one year and I have no regrets. I replaced 2 Pi 3 that I was using before go run Pi-Hole, Home Assistant and some other services. Power consumption is quite good as well, no regrets, indeed a good alternative to Pi and any other MiniPC.
I really wish there was a device like this that could be used as a type of "blade server" that could be inserted into a standard 1u/2u short-depth rack mounted chassis. That would let me re-use my existing 8u wallmounted rack instead of a shelf with zip-ties.
This looks like a nice home server if you have power, size, and noise constraints. I enjoy used enterprise gear personally, but my total power consumption is about 15x what this board uses.
After many years with 2 Raspberry Pi (3 version later upgraded to 4) I bought 2 Minisforum GK41 : 1 CPU J4125, 8GB RAM, 256 GB NVME, 2 Ethernet 1Gb/s, 1 SATA connector and internal slot for a SSD disk.
It costed months ago more than 200 Euros, it is now available for less than 150 Euros.
I am very satisfied, it is running Debian testing as server at home and office.
The only drawback is the fan, but is very quiet.
I measured the power consumption and it is around 5W per hour, the same amount of the Raspberry Pi 4.
If you care about the noise and size, but not so much about looks, you can also pick up a nice N5105 box for about the same price from Amazon, but with tons of ethernet ports available.
I’d really like to consolidate my FX8350, 32GB, 2xsata ssd, 4xhdd, 4port gig pcie nic server into a lower power consumption device. I think if it had dual 2.5g nics and dual nvme, plus a couple sata built in I’d be happy. But more than one drive keyed m.2 for nvme on a sbc isn’t common, especially with sata or a pcie slot.
I tried a RockPro64, but it didn’t quite live up to the task.
I do think that in 2023 1Gbe is starting to feel bit outdated when 2.5(/5/10) Gbe is becoming commodity. Something like NanoPi R5S has 2x2.5Gbe, and a nvme slot, all in nice little low power package. Sure, it doesn't have sata slots that OP wants, but I'd imagine similar ARM/Rockchip devices are available in all sorts of configurations.
2nd hand laptops like those X and T series easily beat this server with some RAM and SSD upgrades. I got T430 i3 and i5 for around 150 dollars a piece. I dont see the needs of Zima unless you really prefer new crippled compute. Even using Zulu or Rp5 or Op5 make more sense than Zima.
am i still paranoid about the news that supermicro motherboards were modified by chinese manufacturers to add spying hardware? I don’t want to buy hardware anymore.
oh, and for the record, fuck the People’s Republic of China.
If you're referring to that rice-sized chip that was being soldered onto motherboards. IIRC, the authors of that piece on Bloomberg have a history of writing nonsense. This particular article got absolutely no external confirmation. The Risky Biz podcast had some good discussion around the time it came out.
More than anything the Zimaboard website just turns me off to buying this, ever. For an enthusiast community, start w/ raw specs up front. Not fancy picture of what's possible. We all know what's possible.
The website screams of trying too hard w/ the specs eventually listed when you scroll all the way to the bottom of the pages.
Perhaps the target is people that don't know anything about technology? Or maybe to show off some web dev skills.
* at least integrated GPU, if not a slot for a discrete GPU
* NVMe
This would replace my large, noisy, power hungry rack with a single unit that would handle OPNSense, home automation, security cameras, and my various apps like photo management, nextcloud, mastodon, minecraft servers for the kids, etc
I don't think anyone sells anything like this, but I think it might not be hard to build using Framework laptop parts, a cheap POE switch, and a custom built case...
May not be a "catastrophe", but this is a perfectly valid point.
RAM bitflips is one of the sources of bitrot. You may use ZFS, do scrubbing and what not, yet still end up with a corrupted data, because it'd be damaged before it hits the storage.
Such a blanket statement is simply not true, sorry, even if ZFS fans like to repeat such mantras. That's like saying that a server without redundant power supplies isn't a server.
Google famously ran all of Google search on a million or so cheap desktop-class home-built white boxes (for want of a better term) without dreaming of ECC.
It really depends on the workload and what your goals are. There are plenty of places to introduce bitrot aside from RAM, and it's obvious that ECC can't catch all bitrot.
If you're not checksumming/hashing, then you won't catch it either, and if you are, then the likelihood of the bitrot matching that hash is basically nil and you'll always detect the bitrot.
This makes me think: is there some sort of kernel plugin that ECC-ifies existing memory in software? Similar to how you can implement RAID in software.
I even vaguely remember a kernel module (?) that transparently performed in-RAM compression so that you effectively used less memory at the cost of increased CPU usage. Can't find it anymore though.
If you manage to decipher anything from this, let us all know. I feel like I'm missing out on the wisdom of Jerry, presumably the protagonist of Cyberpunk 2077.
> "I suspect that a similarily configured Raspberry Pi 4/5 with all the accessories added on top would result in a price that’s quite similar to the cost of a top-of-the-line Zimaboard."
With respect to the author, why would you not take 10 seconds to verify this claim? A cursory Google search shows that an 8 GB Pi 4 with passive case and PSU is ~$100 all-in. If you can wait a couple of weeks the Pi 5 offers a nice performance bump (and PCIe!) for about the same price factoring in the official active cooler and case.
Hi, author here. I went ahead and did the math based on offerings in raspberrypi.dk since that's the reseller that the official Raspberry Pi website directs me to as someone living in Estonia.
Raspberry Pi 4 8GB: 92.87 EUR
"Armor Aluminium heatsink case for Raspberry Pi 4": 19.01 EUR
Official Raspberry Pi power supply: 10.80 EUR
32GB microSD card: 12.17 EUR (and on sale)
At this point the subtotal is 134.85 EUR (~142 USD). Budget about 10-20 EUR on shipping on top of that, so about 150 EUR.
And to run two SATA SSD-s off of the Raspberry Pi, you'd need an extra USB to SATA adapters. ICY BOX ones are quite good, those are about 15-20 EUR each, and are unlikely to work properly because of power limitations. I've done the testing in the past, one SSD is OK, two is a bit too much for the board, so you'd need to rig them up with external power, adding cost.
To have something similar, we're looking at about 180+ EUR (~190 USD) worth of gear to replicate what we'd find with a Zimaboard, and with trade-offs and inferior results (USB-SATA is worse than plain SATA).
I think it's a fair comparison, at least with EU market prices.
Thanks OP for the breakdown of potential cost of similar Pi 4 set up.
Interestingly, based on the PiHut prices, the total cost of 8GB RPi 5, power supply, heat sink with fan (active cooler) and case will be around £90. A high quality 128GB microSD card is around £9 and that makes a basic server RPi 5 setup to be just within £100. Add to the fact it has a spare PCIe slot for potential Gen 3.0 of high speed SATA interface and now the RPi 5 is even less power hungry compared to the previous version, the mini home server with RPi is very tempting, indeed.
Maybe it's just a company in Hong Kong trying to offload old inventory, maybe it's something else (i.e. Intel SIPP), but I wouldn't recommend it either way, unless power is free and you really want to minimally reduce e-waste (which is what this is).
You can get practically any later generation for the same (or lower) price with the same (or better) features but higher performance. Even a 5W design from Qotom from the same era would be a better choice.
An example: an ODM has a X30G-N5100 which is a 4-core 4-threads based Intel SoC from 2021 with (LP)DDR4 support burst to 2.8Ghz and a TDP of 6W. Normally you'd not have them burn full power all the time and you're more likely to use 3 to 4W. It has modern features, modern security and mainstream support for all of it. And if that's too new for you, you can get a J4xxx or N4xxx series box for half the price of that zima, but double the performance.