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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

#71

Post by cramjabsyn »

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.

They run laptop components so try more like 5-15W normally

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

#72

Post by aborsy »

_cenw wrote: post #39
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.

More reason to buy the kind of passively cooled mini PC people get as pfSense routers from AliExpress & co. You get Jasper Lake (2021) or even Alder Lake (2023) instead of the much older Apollo Lake from 2016. The only thing you really miss out on is the form factor and the PCIe slot.

And 2X SATA ports, although they may not have enough power to drive 2X 3.5” hard drives.

You could do 2X 4TB SSD ZFS RAID1.

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

#73

Post by mmcgaha »

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.

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 years ago.

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

#74

Post by hiatus »

_cenw wrote: post #40

ZimaBoard has my favorite garbled mess SEO page. https://www.zimaboard.com/blade/resident-evil-village-coming... If you manage to decipher anything from this, let us all know. I feel like I'm missing out on the wisdom of Jerry, presumably the protagonist of Cyberpunk 2077.

That reads very much like a markov chain-generated text.

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

#75

Post by dharmab »

huhtenberg wrote: post #56
lakomen wrote: post #3

A server without ECC RAM is not a server, sorry. It's a catastrophe bound to happen.

May not be a "catastrophe", but this is a perfectly valid point. RAM bitflips is one of the sources of bitrot. You may use ZFS, do scrubbing and what not, yet still end up with a corrupted data, because it'd be damaged before it hits the storage.

I've seen a single bitflip cause a 3% error rate on a production service

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

#76

Post by Daril »

After many years with 2 Raspberry Pi (3 version later upgraded to 4) I bought 2 Minisforum GK41 : 1 CPU J4125, 8GB RAM, 256 GB NVME, 2 Ethernet 1Gb/s, 1 SATA connector and internal slot for a SSD disk.

It costed months ago more than 200 Euros, it is now available for less than 150 Euros.

I am very satisfied, it is running Debian testing as server at home and office.

The only drawback is the fan, but is very quiet.

I measured the power consumption and it is around 5W per hour, the same amount of the Raspberry Pi 4.

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

#77

Post by oktwtf »

I’d really like to consolidate my FX8350, 32GB, 2xsata ssd, 4xhdd, 4port gig pcie nic server into a lower power consumption device. I think if it had dual 2.5g nics and dual nvme, plus a couple sata built in I’d be happy. But more than one drive keyed m.2 for nvme on a sbc isn’t common, especially with sata or a pcie slot.

I tried a RockPro64, but it didn’t quite live up to the task.

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

#78

Post by justinclift »

aborsy wrote: post #66
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.

You can’t compare used products with brand new ones. You should compare with a used zimaboard market price.

Ebay doesn't list any used Zimaboards when I checked just now. :/

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

#79

Post by doctorpangloss »

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 the i350.

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

#80

Post by Jzush »

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 running on a Cloudflare Tunnel. It's excellent! I had to set up my Cloudflare Tunnel manually but it has since been added as an app to the app repository. https://github.com/IceWhaleTech/CasaOS-AppStore/issues/158
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