Doesn't sound like a good deal when compared with 2nd hand microservers and small form factor PCs from Ebay.
Things like these:
∙ https://www.ebay.com/itm/175917817224 ⇦ 2x NVMe slots
∙ https://www.ebay.com/itm/204477355543 ⇦ 4x 3.5" drives, ECC memory capable
Note - I don't know those sellers.
In the UK, it would cost more in electricity than the $200 Zimaboard to run one of those eBay machines for a single year.
e.g. 90W 24/7 for a year is ~£212 (~$258 US), 60W 24/7: ~£142 ($173 US)
In this price range, power-consumption is a _major_ decision factor.
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.
Have a look at systems people have built or tested [0]. The cutoff for this table is 30W max.
[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzs...
I agree that power consumption is a big cost that people don’t think about though.
The cpu in the microserver (2nd item) is socketed, so you can swap it out for something lower power if you really wanted to.
For me, I've actually upgraded the cpus in my microservers (several of them) as I tend to use them hard at times. :)
What is next - I shower once per week to preserve energy :D
https://www.reddit.com/r/minilab/comments/zlowh2/hp_prodesk_...
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.
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.
For fallback purposes I bought a VGA to HDMI adapter like this:
https://www.scorptec.com.au/product/cables-&-adapters/displa...
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.
I guess now I need to find a way to turn it back on again...
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.
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.
edit: It’s the Futro S740
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.
The next step larger systems are probably a better bet.
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.
As for what software you can run: you can do that on any PC, that has nothing to do with this board.
[0] https://www.servethehome.com/almost-a-decade-in-the-making-o...
> An original design manufacturer is a company that designs and manufactures a product that is eventually rebranded by another firm for sale.
Speaking of which, guessing the Raspberry Pi 5 with PCIe is going to give the Zimaboard a run for its money.
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.
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.
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.
Zram? https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/blockdev/zram.html
It won't ECC your memory, but it can handle compression just fine.
The one I'm using as home server is consuming 3.48 W now with a Samsung 850 SSD (1 TB.)
Great for samba shares and a bunch of containers.
The argon one raspberry pi 4 case is very good for wall mounting, though it connects with the m.2 drive via USB 3, which kinda sucks.
It's about the setup of the wall.
> 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.
Same with the new zimablade - looks pretty sharp even though open air would cool better
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.
https://www.zimaboard.com/blade/resident-evil-village-coming...
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.
Funny enough, I just had the ad for the ZimaCube pop up on Facebook (holds 6 drives, up to 164TB)
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:
∙ https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/226261/...
∙ https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/231803/...
So, that's a fail. Hard pass unfortunately. :(
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'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.
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, ...
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.
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.
[1] https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/J4105-ITX/
[2] https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/cs...
The cost is higher, but you could probably bring it way down with used components. The Zimaboard isn’t using new generation hardware anyway.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1bbD1kw334
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
oh, and for the record, fuck the People’s Republic of China.
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?
I bricked or trashed too many BTRFS drive setups to ever trust it again. If I went to anything else it would be bcachefs.
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
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Firewall-Appliance-HUNSN-Barebone-Sto...
I tried a RockPro64, but it didn’t quite live up to the task.
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.
* No larger than a very thick laptop
* 2 SFP+ ports
* 8 POE ports
* zigbee, zwave, and maybe rtlsdr radio
* large laptop battery as a UPS
* built in TPU
* decent CPU
* 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...
