Move Over Raspberry Pi

Not everyone has a desire to build, maintain, and run a fully kitted out server rack, especially if you just need a few self hosted services. Raspberry Pi offers an accessible, low-power option, but demand has driven prices unreasonably high. That's where ZimaBoard comes in, it's a powerful single board computer with micro server functionality baked in. In this video I examine the out of the box experience. Can your network use a new single board server?

But first ... What am I drinking?
It's "percussive" and dank - the Blast Beat Sultana Hop IPA. Clocking in at 6.7%, you'll find the perfect rhythm to drink to.

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The following music was used for this media project:
Music: Lo Fi Hip Hop 06 by WinnieTheMoog

0:00 Intro
1:19 Wlecome Back
1:50 ZimaBoard Overview
4:00 Features
5:25 CasaOS
7:23 First Snag
8:44 Support
10:14 Conclusion
12:18 Beer

[noburt]

As much as I like things like this. I feel like SBC like a Pi fit what they do because of the price
For about this price range, if not cheaper. I can pick up a mini PC from HP, Dell, Lenovo. Using either an i5/i3/celeron/some with an i7 of a somewhat recent generation, or some Ryzen 3, 5's athlons
The biggest difference being that it doesn't have the two sata ports, but has one sata on the inside, with some just having two M.2 (which I'm thinking I might pick one of those up and see if I can 3d print an external 3.5 inch mount for it along with using an M.2 to sata adapter)
But you end up with something that has more horse power, far more ram, and could even run a few VM's for a very similar price.

[Ametisti]

The price shocked me, but I also hadn't realised Pis have apparently gotten expensive either... I got one back in 2020, but that was just a 3B+ that cost me £31.

[TheTrulyInsane]

I think you need to look in to docker a little more, you're talking about updates and data, my docker containers are all running with their data stored outside of the container and fully backed up. I can update the docker container by restarting it, and if I lose the container, all I have to do is download a new one and point it to the data folder.. running VMs is great in certain cases, but I think you're really missing out on what Docker can do

[JoshBarker]

One thing nobody doing these Pi alternative videos ever seem to discuss is one of the Pi's biggest features, the GPIO and software support for using those GPIO. I use Pi's in a project I am working on and need to be able to program those pins for running buttons, relays and LED's. We looked at alternative boards when Pi's got impossible to get or were exteremely marked up by scalpers. In my research no other boards had any real software support around using the GPIO making them usless for our project needs.

[EraYaN]

Right where you were showing the list of docker mounted volumes was were you can add volumes as well (on the right hand side). Restart the container and the path is now mounted. It has nothing to do with permissions really, its just a misunderstanding of how containers work.

[Kfrankie]

I just recently got one of the 832 models, I believe there is solder points to the right of the PCIE slot for front IO that a power and reset button could be connected to, but I don't know the pinout yet for them, also you can change the directory for any docker container by first going into the files folder to browse the file directory, going to whatever location you want the storage to be for that docker container, creating a folder for what you are wanting, then right clicking the folder and selecting "copy path" then pasting that path into the host path field in the container settings, I tested this with plex and it worked wonderfully, although there is no documentation that I could find for it.

[Azlehria]

One major caveat about using these for pfSense that you didn't mention: the Realtek NICs. I, and numerous others, have had nothing but problems trying to run pfSense with Realtek NICs on a gigabit WAN. The best I could ever manage, even with manually-updated drivers, was ~350 Mbps.

Replacing my Realtek NICs with Intel NICs immediately, and effortlessly, increased my peak WAN speeds to >900 Mbps.

[FrancescoCarucci]

I put promox on my zimaboard, created a bunch of VMs, one of which is a pihole and another one is a docker swarm node. This little guy has been working hard and using up less than 5W. Impressive.

[markusmaeder]

Replaced my 'fat' Proxmox server (home automation and NAS) with two Zimaboard servers running Proxmox. Moving the lxc containers was easy and power consumption is now reduced to half of the server I replaced. The new setup is stable as a rock. A Zimaboard version with 16 GB memory would be on my wishlist to be able to spin up more lxc containers.

[ezforsaken]

I've been experimenting with laptop motherboards, to make them work as SBCs, and I've had many interesting results. I think that in order to promote home-lab/home-servers, that are really cheap and available, and better than things like the PI, AND also reduce ewaste greatly, there should be a movement of enthusiasts transforming those good old laptop mobos into "sbc" or home server setups. There's little content of that on youtube, and it does requiring some figuring out (like powering them, turning them on, and settings so that the thing works more like a server than like a laptop while still sipping power). Maybe you can tap into that space Jeff? just a suggestion :) love your content keep it up!

[robotduck]

People buying up Raspberry Pi not just because of it's ability as a server, it runs on ARM and low power needed, it has GPIO ports, it is cheaper than any x86 boards

[mcegear]

I do like the Zima board.
I just immediately installed Ubuntu server minimal, installed docker with the docker folder on a mounted 1tb sata drive. I just plugged in 2 8tb usb hard drives for media storage and use portainer to manage a jellyfin and a bind9 DNS server with a samba server and cron jobs using rsync to do light data backups.
Worked well and just took a day to replace my old pi solutions with.

[xx-mxut]

This was more a review of the operating system than the board itself. To make it feel like less of an advertorial it would have been nice to test a few PCIE addons, give an idea of performance of the online NICs and SATA ports etc. Hopefully a follow up will come! Love your content.

[willallen]

I just bought a HP sff pc with a 6th gen I5 for $75 shipped, this seems like a solution without a problem to me.

[yren]

May I suggest mini PCs such as prodesk mini? Slightly bigger profile, but also much more powerful. They often come with Intel AMT, which provides out of band management and remote kvm.

[stalbaum]

I got an intel n5105 mini pc with 2.5gbps for $110 I saw on a video, when they were $90! It is a Melefon. That's 4 cores for less than the Zima 2 core.

[ThBeowulf]

I like these little machines but I feel like once you start to hit this price point, a comparably equipped 1L micro PC is a better value especially since neither a 1L or this SBC supports PoE.

Excellent video and honest review!

[terrydaktyllus]

Yes, everyone, listen to this man!

PLEASE stop buying Raspberry Pi's - then there will be some left in stock at normal retail prices in some places so I can buy some.

[joed]

A used i5 business mini pc from EBay is usually cheaper and far more powerful than any Celeron-based computer. If you do not need the specialized features of this product then there are definitely better/more affordable options on the used market.

[marcogenovesi]

Obligatory shoutout to the old-ish sff office mini PCs you can get for similar price and have more power and IO. ServeTheHome channel has a long series about them and what you can expect from those. They have reached a point where you can get a lot of bang for your buck