Zimaboard: The closest thing to my dream home server setup

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.

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.

> This variant of the board costs 200 USD ...

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.

I do think that in 2023 1Gbe is starting to feel bit outdated when 2.5(/5/10) Gbe is becoming commodity.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.

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.