81–90 of 171 posts
https://www.amazon.com/Firewall-Appliance-HUNSN-Barebone-Sto...
* No larger than a very thick laptop
* 2 SFP+ ports
* 8 POE ports
* zigbee, zwave, and maybe rtlsdr radio
* large laptop battery as a UPS
* built in TPU
* decent CPU
* at least integrated GPU, if not a slot for a discrete GPU
* NVMe
This would replace my large, noisy, power hungry rack with a single unit that would handle OPNSense, home automation, security cameras, and my various apps like photo management, nextcloud, mastodon, minecraft servers for the kids, etc
I don't think anyone sells anything like this, but I think it might not be hard to build using Framework laptop parts, a cheap POE switch, and a custom built case...
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 performance bump (and PCIe!) for about the same price factoring in the official active cooler and case.
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.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/203655558873 (no relation with the seller)
Although multiple SATA to USB3 cases should be a viable option too; I plan to build my next home server using one of them paired to a mini PC with lower power requirements than the one I use now.
If you care about Sata3 interfaces, the Odroid HC4 has two of them with vertical disk holders. https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-hc4/odroid-hc4 The one I'm using as home server is consuming 3.48 W now with a Samsung 850 SSD (1 TB.)
One thing I don't really understand about the Zimaboard is why it comes in such a good looking enclosure? If you want to use it with stuff connected to the PCIe/SATA ports you'll always need some extra enclosure/case anyway to keep things clean. At that point why not just ship a board like a Raspberry PI, etc? > btrfs has had some issues in the past, especially with the RAID5/6 setup I'm pretty sure that btrfs still…
Same with the new zimablade - looks pretty sharp even though open air would cool better
I do think that in 2023 1Gbe is starting to feel bit outdated when 2.5(/5/10) Gbe is becoming commodity. Something like NanoPi R5S has 2x2.5Gbe, and a nvme slot, all in nice little low power package. Sure, it doesn't have sata slots that OP wants, but I'd imagine similar ARM/Rockchip devices are available in all sorts of configurations.
This one is x86 architecture, and if you need more speed, there's one 4x PCIe slot available for expansion.
Does it have IPMI?