ZimaBoard: The Home Server Swiss Army Knife

The ZimaBoard is way more useful than I expected!

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Cable Matters USB Enclosure:

12V POE Adapter

Checkout @NovaspiritTech's Video!
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Music (in order):
"If You Want To" - Me
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Gear I Use: (affiliate links)

Recording Gear

Servers and Networking
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:20 What is this video?
2:15 The Specs
4:50 Why the ZimaBoard might make sense
7:24 Homelab Swiss Army Knife
10:25 Putting it to use (CasaOS)
11:00 Jellyfin in CasaOS with Transcoding
12:17 Windows
12:29 Cinebench R15 + Power Draw + Thermals
13:40 ZimaBoard + Graphics Cards
15:50 Virtual Machines in Proxmox
17:13 NAS With OpenMediaVault
18:40 I had fun messing with it
20:07 Things I DON'T like
23:58 Wishful thinking
24:59 Wrapping up

[michaelkane]

This looks like a development platform, kind of like a Raspberry Pi. The manufacturer just supplies the platform, it's up to makers to come up with cool ways to use it. The stupid scalper pricing on Pi based stuff lately has me looking at those, glad you did this video.

[tac]

I have a 216, which I dedicate to running SpinRite. I connect it to a drop-in SATA III dock. For power on/off, I use a smart plug, and just tell Alexa to power it up or down. I have no complaints! I'm currently running SpinRite 6.1 RC-1, doing a Level 5 on a 4TB NAS drive. The ZIMABOARD is warm, but not anywhere near alarmingly so. It's perfect for this application.

[edwardfletcher]

Try not to limit yourself, if there's HW you love and rely on, we want to know about it.

If you're offered something really cool and handy, we want to know about it 👍

[kaylorbill]

What you just did is a really good and comprehensive product review. You did a good job. You should do more.

[darekmistrz]

19:55 what are these cheaper solutions? I know you mentioned old hardware, but honestly from new off shelf stuff there isn't anything like this, especially with this price it's not that expensive.

[patrickpaganini]

Great to have such confidence you could fix problems. Hypothesis is always a nice land.

[zushiba]

FYI, I went to the Zima shop and their PCIe to NVMe SSD adaptor is on sale for $9.99. And if you sign up for their news letter you get $10 off. So you can get one for essentially free. Now I tried, but it tells me that they can't ship to my perfectly normal address in central CA. So, I went and added the USB 3.0 to 2.5' SATA III adapter to the cart because I wanted one of those too and it suddenly decided that it could find my address. So I decided why the hell not and picked up both, with shipping all told $21.80. Super good deal!

[zg]

I think this is a fair review and I was in the same boat. I had been buying Orange PI's for much less and didn't see the purpose of this. After setting it up I went nuts with it and have things running in my home lab that I was too lazy to setup previously. For the time being I was able to mount my aging NAS shares via cifs and that is working great. I have a raid enclosure I will add to replace the nas, but for now it is fine. I tried Jellyfin, but unfortunately it sucks for live tv, Plex has no issues at all and can stream 3 channels at a time with no quality issues. I would love to see a PRO version of this, I am not sold on the cube....

[ibrudiiv]

I just picked up a 216 model (on sale!) to replace my rpbi 3b that just died! Using it to free up specific services+ports for LAN use that I had to allocate on my main homelab server temporarily. :-D Can't wait until I have it on hand! I'm between dietpi to check out their x64 version, ubuntu server minimal, and arch. It's gonna be a super light docker host primarily running pihole

[dktol]

The ZimaBoard definitely needs a newer generation low-power CPU - a Jasper Lake N5105 should increase the performance a lot (almost double) without affecting the price much. Maybe offer a 16GB RAM version with the N5105. Definitely a power and reset switch. Another reviewer wanted direct POE support, but a POE splitter looks good enough to me.

[cesarvarela]

What he meant was "jack of all trades, master of none"

[catcam]

Guru meditation ! Nice easter egg ! Many thanks for great content and all best from Croatia.

[KeithWeston]

My Zima board mostly gathers dust these days. I ran it for a while to do Tadarr re-encoding with a Syncthing folder. It was fun for a while. Then it wasn't. I'll keep it and it's at the ready for any time a project comes to mind; but mostly it gathers dust.

[jasonk]

I think it's neat. Not sure I am in love with the form factor. I like the passive cooling but as soon as you add things to it. Pci. You might as well get something with a case. What this is missing is a rack mount case adapter.

[MADr]

Can i ask what speakers those are behind u on you setup? They look pretty nice

[DynMads]

You could get an angled riser for the pcie port right? So you can aim cards upwards making them "stand up" like you are used to from a motherboard.

[guy_autordie]

A 1U rackmount chassis to mount X of these with an update version with POE and/or USB-C power (on the sata ports side) with noctua 40mm fans.

[fourex]

Given the choice between a Zimaboard, the Zimaboard Blade and the new Raspberry Pi5, which is the superior machine to use as an entry level home lab?

[dabbridges]

A PCIE riser cable would solve the varying thickness of PCIE boards.

[donoteatmikezila]

I don't understand the form factor. How am I supposed to use this thing? Am I supposed to mount it on a board? If I use the IO on it I'll have cables coming out of both ends and a pci-e card just kind of hanging off of one side? It's not exactly sleek if it turns into a cable medusa as soon as you use it. The drives have nowhere to mount, so they're just kind of hanging off, or running to another enclosure that's not affixed to it at all? It looks like a mess.