131–140 of 171 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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…
You'd think, but a good test is to punch into google "e1000e proxmox issues" or "i210 proxmox issues." You'll discover that in addition to i225 issues another commenter is talking about, the Intel NICs shipping on the USFF PCs also have catastrophic issues in Linux and Windows.
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.
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 d…
> An original design manufacturer is a company that designs and manufactures a product that is eventually rebranded by another firm for sale.
Nothing against Zimaboard but the best part of the article (for me) is his cable organization shown in his conclusion. So pretty.
The author is using an IKEA Skadis setup which is pretty popular in the 3D printing community. There’s a bunch of prints available for it, highly recommend if you need a wall organization of some sort.
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.
As for what software you can run: you can do that on any PC, that has nothing to do with this board.
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.
> 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/
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'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.
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.
[0] https://www.servethehome.com/almost-a-decade-in-the-making-o...