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Zimaboard: The closest thing to my dream home server setup

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Re: Zimaboard: The closest thing to my dream home server setup

#101

Post by zamadatix »

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.

Re: Zimaboard: The closest thing to my dream home server setup

#102

Post by viraptor »

zamadatix wrote: post #101

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 pe…

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.

Re: Zimaboard: The closest thing to my dream home server setup

#103

Post by jcuenod »

Jzush wrote: post #80
justinclift wrote: post #6

> 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.

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 ru…

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.

Re: Zimaboard: The closest thing to my dream home server setup

#104

Post by hddherman »

faefox wrote: post #85

> "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 p…

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.

Re: Zimaboard: The closest thing to my dream home server setup

#105

Post by jcuenod »

naikrovek wrote: post #51

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.

Re: Zimaboard: The closest thing to my dream home server setup

#106

Post by mike_d »

thekombustor wrote: post #97
okramcivokram wrote: post #4

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.

The Zima Blade isn't actually USB-C powered - it's just a USB-C port carrying a raw 12V. No PD negotiation supported. 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.

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.

Re: Zimaboard: The closest thing to my dream home server setup

#107

Post by doctorpangloss »

zamadatix wrote: post #101

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 pe…

> over-focus on being fanless for silence

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, ...

Re: Zimaboard: The closest thing to my dream home server setup

#108

Post by kjs3 »

mmcgaha wrote: post #73
dominick-cc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ye…

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.

Re: Zimaboard: The closest thing to my dream home server setup

#109

Post by kjs3 »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #79
justinclift wrote: post #6

> 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.

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 th…

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.

Re: Zimaboard: The closest thing to my dream home server setup

#110

Post by nrp »

mike_d wrote: post #106
thekombustor wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Zima Blade isn't actually USB-C powered - it's just a USB-C port carrying a raw 12V. No PD negotiation supported. 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.

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.

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.
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