Zimaboard Mini Silent Server Review - THIS IS INSANE!!!

Video Chapters
00:00 - The Start
00:31 - Who is the Zimaboard for?
01:00 - But What actually IS the Zimaboard?
01:49 - Hardware Specifications of the Zimaboard
03:35 - Zimaboard Review, Unboxing
05:49 - Size, Noise and Weight of the Zimaboard
07:30 - Zimaboard Review, Design
07:50 - Close-Up Shot
10:30 The PCIe Slot is been implemented very well
13:38 - Zimaboard Review, Ports and Connections
21:03 - Zimaboard Review, Internal Hardware
23:20 - Close-up of device opened up
27:09 - Zimaboard Review, Included CasaOS Software
36:29 - Zimaboard Review, Verdict & Conclusion

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[JamesOpr]

Ok I'll tell him. The Tricorder is what the science officer used for testing environmentals. The talking device was simply named the communicator.

[JustinGoldsmith]

I have a 216 running pfSense like a champion and an 832 running TrueNAS. These things are incredible.

[John.Fielding]

So I've been searching for something EXACTLY like that card you have at 17 minutes in that's four lanes of PCIE to four M.2 slots, one lane per slot. Every time I've looked I've always come up empty, the closest I'd find are adapters that wire up four lanes per M.2 slot (either x4 to one M.2 or x16 to four M.2) or use a single lane to drive two or four SATA M.2 slots instead of NVME. If you've got a link to where someone could buy THAT EXACT card you have there it would be very much appreciated!

[the_bogeyman.]

I am curious to see how much better they could do as retromachine (retropie/batocera kinda thing) with a device like this, compared to a R.pi 4B/400.

[HiltonT]

When they come out with an N5xxx or N6005-based unit with 16 GB of RAM and 2.5 GbE, then I'd be really interested for use as a Proxmox clustering setup...

[Osmosis]

Because I'm an idiot and like to waste my money I've been buying all kinds of devices to start building a DIY or even unraid as an alternative to my Synology Diskstations which I think I've out-grown and I have just stumbled across Zimaboard a PCI nvme adapter like you have show in your video to create some kind of frankenstine NAS that will offer out better performance for plex, which I let my family access remotely! I've ordered the 832 to expirement with! Great video :)

[CanonDMkII]

Looks to me like you have a cyborg pc there that requires a very specific use case. I bought a NUC with an Intel N5095, 16GB RAM, 500GB M2 with Windows Pro 11 for under $200. It is an insane value.

[ibrudiiv]

I'm thinking of throwing dietpi on the 2GB RAM model. I gotta free ye olde port 53 on my unraid server 😀

[alexp]

I don't believe seagulls seasonally migrate... Their noise is suspiciously absent. LoL.

[skeenster]

Awesome video you gained a subscriber ❤

[rtbrt]

In theory you could use that thing as a plex media server and connect it to an external qnap RAID case. ^^

[mtstek]

Can you provide the link to M.2 NVME PCI expansion card you mentioned in the video @17:03. thx! Looks cool.

[RLFWE]

Might be a nice way to update ye olde hp n36l microservers if used with a PCIe 2.0 raid/drive controller card that had the right miniSAS connector to plug into the HP SATA(SAS?) backplane, and use the nice HP drive caddies.

[ajoshuaja]

A pcie riser cable would solve the clearance issue

[Sismodium]

In regard to the PCI slot. Can't you just use a PCI- e riser cable. They cost what £20, then you can use whatever PCI-e card you want.

[_____rnld]

Intro music: soothing. Transition music: obnoxious.

[dfgdfg_]

The chips in the zima are long in the tooth now and well overdue an update to Alder-Lake N-series

[HiltonT]

You could also just Dremel down the backplate on PCIE cards

[hspank]

where is the stackable expandable home lab cluster solution with high speed interconnect bus - oculink, u2 pci, like mixblade, as an alternative to turing pi but x86 based: router - nas/p2p - audio/video - retro/cloudgaming - homeautomation - with a kybernetes type system you could swap the images you currently want to use, and keep a base cluster at 2 units, expanding as needed. only the base (router) unit needs multiple 2.5gbit and various io ports, all the upgrade compute units can be bare bone and smaller.should be standard now, as well as usb-c 3.2 2x2 20gb/s. which brings us to the second unit needed: a 4-5 bay SAS/SATA storage subsystem, 20gb/s and some slots for m2 sds for caching, not as a separate nas, but as a storage focused usb hub - again, due to the overhead of usb-c, the alternative bus would be pciie based, similar to oculink.

[andrewcoban]

Does it support pci-e video cards and what is a limitation?