Zimaboard: The closest thing to my dream home server setup

Zima is average-good at branding and maybe styling and that&#x27;s about it. The hardware is pretty much random ODM low power designs, but based on ancient 2016 era releases.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s just a company in Hong Kong trying to offload old inventory, maybe it&#x27;s something else (i.e. Intel SIPP), but I wouldn&#x27;t recommend it either way, unless power is free and you really want to minimally reduce e-waste (which is what this is).<p>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.<p>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&#x27;d not have them burn full power all the time and you&#x27;re more likely to use 3 to 4W. It has modern features, modern security and mainstream support for all of it. And if that&#x27;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.

&gt; This variant of the board costs 200 USD ...<p>Doesn&#x27;t sound like a good deal when compared with 2nd hand microservers and small form factor PCs from Ebay.<p>Things like these:<p>∙ <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ebay.com&#x2F;itm&#x2F;175917817224" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ebay.com&#x2F;itm&#x2F;175917817224</a> ⇦ 2x NVMe slots<p>∙ <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ebay.com&#x2F;itm&#x2F;204477355543" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ebay.com&#x2F;itm&#x2F;204477355543</a> ⇦ 4x 3.5&quot; drives, ECC memory capable<p>Note - I don&#x27;t know those sellers.

Nothing against Zimaboard but the best part of the article (for me) is his cable organization shown in his conclusion. So pretty.

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.<p>mmcblk0 ... 14.7G<p>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.”<p>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.<p>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.<p>This is a machine with the “Apple tax,” i.e., a higher resale value than a PC.<p>You can jump on eBay and have a blast with “HP EliteDesk” as your search term.<p>I have to admit, though, a PCIe slot on a system this small is nice to have.

There’s also the upcoming Zima Blade that is very tiny too, quite a bit cheaper, with a SO-DIMM slot, single Ethernet port, and USB-C powered.

One thing I don&#x27;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&#x2F;SATA ports you&#x27;ll always need some extra enclosure&#x2F;case anyway to keep things clean. At that point why not just ship a board like a Raspberry PI, etc?<p>&gt; btrfs has had some issues in the past, especially with the RAID5&#x2F;6 setup<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure that btrfs still has major issues with RAID 5 &amp; 6, and that these RAID modes are not recommended to be used in anger.

If you care about Sata3 interfaces, the Odroid HC4 has two of them with vertical disk holders. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.odroid.com&#x2F;odroid-hc4&#x2F;odroid-hc4" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.odroid.com&#x2F;odroid-hc4&#x2F;odroid-hc4</a><p>The one I&#x27;m using as home server is consuming 3.48 W now with a Samsung 850 SSD (1 TB.)

NixOS makes ZFS feel like part of the kernel again if you configure it to only use ZFS-compatible kernels. Had that setup for about 2 years now.<p>I bricked or trashed too many BTRFS drive setups to ever trust it again. If I went to anything else it would be bcachefs.

For those who are interested in faster network, can look at R86s variants: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.servethehome.com&#x2F;the-gowin-r86s-revolution-low-power-2-5gbe-and-10gbe-intel-nvidia&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.servethehome.com&#x2F;the-gowin-r86s-revolution-low-p...</a><p>The 10Gb NIC is actually an mellanox cx3 series with OCP connector, theretically you can replace it with some more interesting cards like cx5&#x2F;6, or solarflare&#x27;s

&gt; 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.<p>Funny enough, I just had the ad for the ZimaCube pop up on Facebook (holds 6 drives, up to 164TB)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zimacube.zimaboard.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zimacube.zimaboard.com&#x2F;</a>

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 &quot;TinyMiniMicro&quot; 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).<p>If your goal is to 3d print a custom case, mount things externally, and tinker these kinds of things that&#x27;s great but I feel a lot of tech folks get caught up in &quot;tinkering&quot; needing to equal &quot;the best option&quot;. I&#x27;m not saying there is anything wrong with tinkering, I&#x27;ve actually got a few devices mentioned like the mentioned Flashstor 12 and it&#x27;s a lot of fun to mess with. At the same time, I&#x27;d sooner call them my dream tinkering devices than my dream home server.

I&#x27;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 &quot;blade server&quot; that could be inserted into a standard 1u&#x2F;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&#x2F;s, 1 SATA connector and internal slot for a SSD disk.<p>It costed months ago more than 200 Euros, it is now available for less than 150 Euros.<p>I am very satisfied, it is running Debian testing as server at home and office.<p>The only drawback is the fan, but is very quiet.<p>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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Firewall-Appliance-HUNSN-Barebone-Storage&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B0B53MKZBX" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Firewall-Appliance-HUNSN-Barebone-Sto...</a>

Tbh second hand USFF or SFF PCs make excellent home servers. They have powerful x86_64 CPUs, are power efficient and can be had for sub $100

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.<p>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(&#x2F;5&#x2F;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&#x27;t have sata slots that OP wants, but I&#x27;d imagine similar ARM&#x2F;Rockchip devices are available in all sorts of configurations.

If they can update the CPU to either the N95 and N100, it would be the perfect machine. The current CPU is just too old.

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.<p>oh, and for the record, fuck the People’s Republic of China.

How is the performance comparable to a rpi 5?

More than anything the Zimaboard website just turns me off to buying this, ever. For an enthusiast community, start w&#x2F; raw specs up front. Not fancy picture of what&#x27;s possible. We all know what&#x27;s possible.<p>The website screams of trying too hard w&#x2F; the specs eventually listed when you scroll all the way to the bottom of the pages.<p>Perhaps the target is people that don&#x27;t know anything about technology? Or maybe to show off some web dev skills.

The perfect home server for me would be:<p>* No larger than a very thick laptop<p>* 2 SFP+ ports<p>* 8 POE ports<p>* zigbee, zwave, and maybe rtlsdr radio<p>* large laptop battery as a UPS<p>* built in TPU<p>* decent CPU<p>* at least integrated GPU, if not a slot for a discrete GPU<p>* NVMe<p>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<p>I don&#x27;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...

A server without ECC RAM is not a server, sorry. It&#x27;s a catastrophe bound to happen.

What is wyse 5070 extended?

Does it have IPMI?

ZimaBoard has my favorite garbled mess SEO page.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zimaboard.com&#x2F;blade&#x2F;resident-evil-village-coming-this-spring&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zimaboard.com&#x2F;blade&#x2F;resident-evil-village-coming...</a><p>If you manage to decipher anything from this, let us all know. I feel like I&#x27;m missing out on the wisdom of Jerry, presumably the protagonist of Cyberpunk 2077.

&gt; &quot;I suspect that a similarily configured Raspberry Pi 4&#x2F;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.&quot;<p>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.