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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

#121

Post by hendersoon »

oneplane wrote: post #116

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).…

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.

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

#122

Post by jnsaff2 »

alias_neo wrote: post #27
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.

We don't all live in countries where electricity is near-free. 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.

As others have said 60 or 90W is just not true.

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...

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

#123

Post by aborsy »

oneplane wrote: post #116

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).…

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.

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

#124

Post by justinclift »

kjs3 wrote: post #109
doctorpangloss wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 W…

> if it's an Intel or Broadcom chip, you're probably fine

From rough memory, Intel has a bad rep with chipsets above 1GbE speed.

I think the problems are with their 2.5 and 5 GbE chipsets (and not 10GbE?), but I don't run those personally so don't remember the exact specifics.

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

#125

Post by Aleklart »

dominick-cc wrote: post #63
alias_neo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't all live in countries where electricity is near-free. 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.

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.

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.

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

#126

Post by justinclift »

aequitas wrote: post #99
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.

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…

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:

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.

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

#127

Post by justinclift »

bdcravens wrote: post #119

> 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) https://zimacube.zimaboard.com/

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:

∙ 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. :(

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

#128

Post by ghostly_s »

aborsy wrote: post #123
oneplane wrote: post #116

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).…

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.

Isn't putting TrueNas in a VM a big no-no?

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

#129

Post by ghostly_s »

oneplane wrote: post #116

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).…

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.

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

#130

Post by layer8 »

dominick-cc wrote: post #63
alias_neo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't all live in countries where electricity is near-free. 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.

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.

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.
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