151–160 of 171 posts
> 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/
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> But the selling point of this board is IO not CPU > the processor is weak comparatively on the Zima …
Wouldn't you rather have a decent CPU and better I/O at the same price point in a similar form factor? There are options. Some that are better, which is why I posted the link. Not everyone is OK with a couple generations old CPU.
Zima's site showcase benchmarks that position their boards at the same performance level of a Raspberry Pi 4.
The recently announced Raspberry Pi 5 doubles that, improves all IO, and costs between half and a third of an equivalent Zimaboard.
For the price of a Zimaboard, we can drop by Amazon and buy a MiniPC from the likes of Beelink or Minisforum.
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That's why I included a 60W cost too. What's the point running hardware 24/7/365 is it's idle?
Because home servers tend to be bursty on demand workloads. If you doing something that is hammering a CPU at 100% 24/7, then you’d get a faster CPI to get the workload completed faster and you’d be back to having idle CPU cycles… Now RAM on the other hand! Free RAM is wasted RAM!
Not all workloads can be "completed" by throwing hardware at them. The sort of thing this kind of hardware is ideal for is things like home automation.
I run Home Assistant on an Xeon ITX PC with a micro-PSU for example, it's at ~40-60% CPU and ~80% RAM (of 16GB) running inference on my camera streams, handling Zigbee and Z-Wave devices etc, running automations, handling all of the sensors for the doors, lights etc in my home. This isn't a bursty problem you can simply get a more powerful CPU for, the goal here is to keep power down and performance up because it's a constant load. A smaller, lower power micro-PC would save me a bit in energy costs if I wanted to.
For real work, people like me (us?) use real servers like you say; I run a Ryzen 9 12c/24t, AsRock Rack, 2 M.2 NVMe, HBA, 8 SAS bays, 128GB RAM, 6 GbE NICs, with dozens of VMs and containers on, a few Kubernetes clusters, and a bunch of services (git, Harbor, Argo, etc) it uses about 100-150W with my CPU downspecced to 65W TDP.
Now that's a system that has bursty workloads, but it's in a different class to these low power machines that "normal" home users are looking for.
> Now RAM on the other hand! > Free RAM is wasted RAM!
Can't argue with that.
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.
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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.
Is it metal? Can it lead to a short circuit?
A server without ECC RAM is not a server, sorry. It's a catastrophe bound to happen.
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.
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The Lenovo Thinkcentre M720Q and M920Q have both an m.2 M key and an internal PCIe x8 slot you can stuff a GPU, quad gigabit or dual 10GbE into. No ECC though. Sells for about $100 on eBay for a decent one with PSU that is the same PSU as their laptops (Bonus if you're a Thinkpad user). You need a riser and rear bracket for the PCIe slot that can be found on eBay for like $25. I have a 6 core i5, 32GB RAM, a dual Int…
I have a 4x1Gb i350 in my SFF EliteDesk and it can get quite warm. I've had to install an aftermarket small fan for peace of mind, since the case only has a CPU and a PSU fan which don't create any airflow over the extension cards. 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 lyi…
A brand new dual port 10Gb SFP card costs like $100 USD. Used is far less. I also wound up realizing that when it comes to 10Gb, copper can be more costly than fiber and uses more power per port. So I only buy SFP+ gear so I can use one of many interfaces: copper, fiber, DAC, etc. Fiber and DAC cables are cheaper and use less power. I have a ~$250 USD 8 port Mikrotik 10Gb SFP+ switch and also bought a few cheap 10Gb mellanox SFP cards for my server, desktop and work bench PC for like $30 each off ebay (I use them in Linux and FreeBSD.)
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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.
The document you mention is the specification for implementing USB 3.0 on a USB type C connector.
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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.
My understanding is that an in-spec USB-C power supply will supply 5V by default - then, upon negotiation with the client, can go up to a higher voltage. In the case of the Zimaboard, this is basically a 12V barrel jack with a different shape. It just dumps 12V out on the pins with no negotiation or considerations of the client device. I suspect if the downstream device was already 12V compliant, it might survive, bu…
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Disabling the fan is too much work so you want to go to a board which requires you to come up with your own external drive mounting solution? Maybe we just have different ideas on what takes lots of tinkering, which is fair, as I'll take figuring out a software setting over building something or having external mount components. I'd recommend something like a Beelink over an old NUC though. Tends to be cheaper than a…
> a board which requires you to come up with your own external drive mounting solution I've got a tray it all lives on, so no attachments needed. Maybe a ziptie. > Disabling the fan is too much work Disabling would be easy, but I can't do that without frying it. Slowing it down means connecting the screen, rebooting into BIOS, adjusting the speed, restarting, collecting data, doing it again to check another setting,…
Having even a tiny amount of airflow drastically increases the cooling capacity though. It's really quite remarkable by how much.
The setting procedure, as a result, ends up much simpler. You set the fans to a static speed where you no longer hear them. If that's off that's fine too, but having even a tiny something is a great help in getting more than the e.g. 6 watts of CPU performance headroom the Zimaboard has. If you're rebooting constantly or adjusting things based on season you've done something drastically wrong as my recommendation was set a static fan speed not tune the box for an overclocking competition.
I will admit you have to plug in a monitor... I will also say most consider that less tinkering than even just zip tieing their server and externally mounted drives to things :).
Again, I can assure this is as easy as I'm saying, no need to invent other possibilities, as I have some of the aforementioned boxes sitting next to me in this exact configuration. Some even beefier but dead silent, like 8 core 64 gb ram mini PCs with 3 drives and dual 2.5G nics running quite silently year round and a single trip into the BIOS (which you should honestly be doing even if you're not going to adjust fan speeds).