My biggest issue with the Zima boards is that they are quite a bit outdated and lack the needed expansion for anything but a tiny home NAS. You basically get what you pay for but I don't even consider a NAS solution unless it can handle a minimum of 5 drives on the same HBA preferably with the ability to add more drives in an external enclosure bay down the road. For the modern average home user with an entry level homelab I would consider a 5 to 8 bay NAS enclosure a good start with a modern energy efficient offering from Intel (12th gen or newer) or AMD Zen (3 or newer) and the ability to handle at least 64GB of ram but 128GB would be ideal and a 10Gbe connection since 2.5Gbe and 10Gbe has become pretty common in the home lab space these days. If I was buying something at this point I would look more at their ZimaCube Pro NAS but it's a pretty hefty price tag for what it is.
That's why I have no regrets backing UGreen NAS and getting a DXP6800 and a DXP8800. The early bird pricing is so good for the hardware you get. They are both now running great and streaming media like a breeze. I also own Synology NAS'es for more important stuff.
I think the tiny micro project by servethehome is probably a better bit of advice for folks to follow. Ex the hp g6. The ms01 though is by far the best micro option
Sometimes cheap is not enough - this could be "fun" as a tinker board to play with, but really it's not a great choice for a NAS or VM/Docker host with the obsolete CPU and limited RAM. (16GB is bare-bones except for very small applications, and there's not enough CPU or RAM to really go much further.) Generally the problem with very small systems, and even with the newer N100 based systems, is going to be PCIe lanes - once you start putting M.2 drives and 10GBe networking your I/O gets very tight. And then you step up to something a bit stronger like an older Xeon D or MS01 and the price goes up and you leave "tinker" land.
In the end I didn't get it. Is it a good product? would it work for say an amateur photographer wanting to backup his archive of raw files? (Will their power unit, included in the nas kit, fry the board?)
They didn't send me an accessory, so clearly they weren't interested in knowing my opinion on it. I turned it into an opportunity to showcase a different way of implementing their product for my use case. No hard feelings.
Do you even do your research or just trying to justify receiving a free product to review. Radxa x4 just released a few weeks ago, N100, costs $60 with 4GB ram, similar size with raspberry pi. Try don't be a shill and be honest for once, people should not buy this in 2024 for that price. Unless they're fire sale it at $30, people should not buy and and you shouldn't encourage this practice.
Then I would suggest you buy that board (I would personally drop an extra $20 on the 8GB variant at least), an M.2 2230 SSD, a case, a heatsink, and some interfaces for SATA disks over USB (doesn't appear to have a SATA controller on board) and call it a day. Would be an awesome setup! Might test in a video later down the road. I put emphasis on the age of these SoCs in my video, specifically called out how they charge way too much for RAM on their site, and heavily criticized the fact that they are openly shipping unsafe power adapters to consumers. There is still value in other aspects that aren't directly related to performance (built in eMMC standard + free 4 lane full size PCIe slot + SODIMM slot for RAM upgrades after sale + on-board SATA controller which is much more suitable for running a RAID etc). It did what I wanted it to do very well. It's a cool piece of hardware and I wholeheartedly stand by my review. If it's not suitable for your use case and you don't see any value in the extras it provides then don't buy it.
My biggest issue with the Zima boards is that they are quite a bit outdated and lack the needed expansion for anything but a tiny home NAS. You basically get what you pay for but I don't even consider a NAS solution unless it can handle a minimum of 5 drives on the same HBA preferably with the ability to add more drives in an external enclosure bay down the road. For the modern average home user with an entry level homelab I would consider a 5 to 8 bay NAS enclosure a good start with a modern energy efficient offering from Intel (12th gen or newer) or AMD Zen (3 or newer) and the ability to handle at least 64GB of ram but 128GB would be ideal and a 10Gbe connection since 2.5Gbe and 10Gbe has become pretty common in the home lab space these days. If I was buying something at this point I would look more at their ZimaCube Pro NAS but it's a pretty hefty price tag for what it is.
That's why I have no regrets backing UGreen NAS and getting a DXP6800 and a DXP8800. The early bird pricing is so good for the hardware you get. They are both now running great and streaming media like a breeze. I also own Synology NAS'es for more important stuff.
Which is better DXP6800 or DXP800?
@@scarfacealpacinoreal They are basically the same except one is 6-bays while the other is 8-bays.
@@xellaz bays meaning storage slots?
@@scarfacealpacinoreal yes
Nice rundown of the positives and negatives of this.
The king of TH-cam is back 👀
haha thanks for watching :)
I think the tiny micro project by servethehome is probably a better bit of advice for folks to follow. Ex the hp g6. The ms01 though is by far the best micro option
Sometimes cheap is not enough - this could be "fun" as a tinker board to play with, but really it's not a great choice for a NAS or VM/Docker host with the obsolete CPU and limited RAM. (16GB is bare-bones except for very small applications, and there's not enough CPU or RAM to really go much further.) Generally the problem with very small systems, and even with the newer N100 based systems, is going to be PCIe lanes - once you start putting M.2 drives and 10GBe networking your I/O gets very tight. And then you step up to something a bit stronger like an older Xeon D or MS01 and the price goes up and you leave "tinker" land.
Interesting, but no n100 CPU then no sale.
can you run Unraid on it?
give the zimablade charger to someone you really really hate
In the end I didn't get it. Is it a good product? would it work for say an amateur photographer wanting to backup his archive of raw files? (Will their power unit, included in the nas kit, fry the board?)
Click bait. This is just a regular POC. Not really for all. .
When you assemble this crap you end up with price close to sinology unit, without any benefits of sinology unit... Not my first choice...
So they wouldn't send you one for free, you couldn't have bought one yourself? Are you that hard up? Or do you just expect everything for free?
They didn't send me an accessory, so clearly they weren't interested in knowing my opinion on it. I turned it into an opportunity to showcase a different way of implementing their product for my use case. No hard feelings.
Do you even do your research or just trying to justify receiving a free product to review.
Radxa x4 just released a few weeks ago, N100, costs $60 with 4GB ram, similar size with raspberry pi.
Try don't be a shill and be honest for once, people should not buy this in 2024 for that price. Unless they're fire sale it at $30, people should not buy and and you shouldn't encourage this practice.
agree with you
🤓
Then I would suggest you buy that board (I would personally drop an extra $20 on the 8GB variant at least), an M.2 2230 SSD, a case, a heatsink, and some interfaces for SATA disks over USB (doesn't appear to have a SATA controller on board) and call it a day. Would be an awesome setup! Might test in a video later down the road.
I put emphasis on the age of these SoCs in my video, specifically called out how they charge way too much for RAM on their site, and heavily criticized the fact that they are openly shipping unsafe power adapters to consumers. There is still value in other aspects that aren't directly related to performance (built in eMMC standard + free 4 lane full size PCIe slot + SODIMM slot for RAM upgrades after sale + on-board SATA controller which is much more suitable for running a RAID etc). It did what I wanted it to do very well.
It's a cool piece of hardware and I wholeheartedly stand by my review. If it's not suitable for your use case and you don't see any value in the extras it provides then don't buy it.
💀 This might be the dumbest comment I've seen on a video in a while.
Nobody buy this as this guy knows nothing about computers this is a complete rip off