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Could you PLEASE change the sound in your intro clip to a CARBONATED BEVERAGE and NOT something FLAT like WATER???? Being that you are a COMPUTER and BEER CHANNEL you should at least make it SOUND LIKE YOUR POUR BEER and not Capri-Sun :)
Technically, pouring a beer should sound like nothing, as out of a tap, bottle or can, you pour down the side and avoid splashing or 'folding' of the liquid. That makes for a pretty terrible sound effect, just like punching someone in a movie would.
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.
@@mgkleym According to an interview with Eben Upton (of the RPi Foundation) a few months ago, the Pi availability for consumers should begin clearing up this summer, and be fully available by fall. Whether retail prices drop back to pre-shortage times, who can say.
@@dktol56 I doubt that. Now that RPi has signed on with Sony, there won't be any consumer availability. Eben got greedy and started catering to corporations. RPi is dead in my eyes. We're better off moving to this, Orange Pi, or RockPi. All three are more powerful than the RPi with lower costs.
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.
I agree. I use a couple HP EliteDesk 800 G3 with i5 6500T and even expanded them with an M.2 2.5GBe NIC in the WiFi M.2 Slot and You still have the advantage to upgrade up to 64GB RAM and even the CPU down the line the G3 35W if I remember correctly would support up to a i7 7700T.
I get your point but there's another difference you're missing: Power Consumption. Any Dell Optiplex Mini with an i3 or i5 would have idle power consumptions way higher than a Pi or the Zima Board. Maybe not a huge deal in US but here in Europe can make a noticiable difference in the bill.
Yeah I would recommend Lenovo and then Dell. I've fixed way too many HP brand computers. They are total junk but I've never actually worked on a small form-factor desktop
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.
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.
The pinout is on their site, a little hard to find. I put a switch on mine and one of the holes is a real challenge to desolder. A momentary switch will power it off and on.
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.
@@edo386as well you can make your own board controlled by uart that can be used directly in code than adding pi pico which is RPi and unnecessary layer of communication
I agree here. It's not a pi replacement without onboard gpio output equivalent to a pi. A lot of people may use a pi in use cases that doesnt need gpio and there are better systems to use than a pi in that case but gpio enabled single boards was the use case pi was originally created for. Now you can build your own gpio controller or whatever but for most projects that's a huge amount of overhead and introduces another layer of communication abstraction which means you can't use software that was written for a pi.
Yes, I agree gpio is a killer feature of rpi, but I didn't use it. Another goodies are large community and documentation. Most of people are too lazy and too busy to play with something poorly documented. Unfortunately, rpi doesn't have pcie and sata. That's a pity. If the prices will be high, then the closest competitors will be old PCs or laptops. And nothing could beat em in price/performance + x86 compatibility category.
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
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.
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.
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.
@mipmipmipmipmip Depending on how much space you have for the machine, and what all you want it to do, you could go with a used office pc. A dell Optiplex 5050, with an i5 6500, 16GB of ram and an ssd for $140 roughly with 2 pcie slots for extra networking. It has an integrated intel nic and you could add up to 4 more nics per pcie slot as well.
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.
If it's designed to run that OS surely that makes it necessary to review as part of the process. If you have problems getting it to do what you want because of terrible / non-existent documentation that's a major stopping point for someone like me who has only a basic knowledge of Linux and relies on guides a lot.
The OS is a MAJOR consideration when choosing ANY computer to use for any project! Countless uninformed people have bought what they thought was the "latest Pi replacement" only to discover they couldn't get it to boot, or not much beyond that. Then, when they looked online to get help, there was little to no documentation, and the company that made it / sold it was not helpful or unresponsive because all their time was going toward trying to patch their firmware. A solid user base is also important. How are you going to get the libraries to flash all your LEDs the way you want, huh? Or, say you want to do something complicated like turn on a light or a fan when you press a button... Are you going to write that software? I didn't think so ... All those factors are important.
Yes it was, but PCIe devices will have the same performance as any other system with an N3450 and Debian. OS is important. If Raspbian was useless I think the RPi wouldn't be so popular either.
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!
@@vluri258 how can you say they are not made to be on 24/7? This doesnt even make any sense. I have 2 machines that havfe been runn ing for 4+ years straight and never get above 70C under heavy load and I havent ever changed thermal paste even. Ridiculous statement
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
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.
5:52 could someone explain this point to me? Not that I think I know better, I’m just curious what he means by Update Resilience when I assume you could just hold off on docker or orchestrator (like portainer) updates until all of your containers support a new version. And for Data Separation, idk, I thought containers that use an organized file structure both on the host system and within the container itself that reference to locations on the host system, then taking all of that data and doing routine backups would be a good enough “data separation” but maybe I’m just missing something here? To anyone who actually answers, thanks! :)
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.
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.
re: Docker volumes, at 8:21 replace "/DATA" with "/mnt/your_ssd/Movies/" etc. "DATA" is just a placeholder. I would love to see you embrace docker/podman more, seems like you're missing out on the benefits of super-light, super-portable containers.
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.
8:26 You might be able to mount --bind your remote location into the folder that emby is configured to use. I remember years ago when I used the snap release of Nextcloud server it had the same issue of not having permissions to the external drive I wanted it to use. Obviously snaps can have those permissions modified, but I worked around it at that time by just doing mount --bind remotedir defaultdir and it worked just fine.
Decided I wanted a small server to take a few services off my unraid box. Looked around at Pi and the alternatives. Then said F it and bought an HP t630 thin client off eBay for $50. Mine came with 8gb ram and 32gb m.2. Dropped ubuntu on it and the network servers and utilities I needed and it's doing just fine.
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
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!
I love the ZimaBoard 832 - I have recently installed 2 of them in my home lab with a third on the way. I agree that the biggest issue is the installed OS. However once I figured this out I have started fresh and thrown that away immediately. I have tried TrueNas Core, Open Media Vault, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Windows 10. Of all the I don’t recommend Windows (but it does run but slow) and CasaOS (too restricted). These are great, low power, silent, and relatively inexpensive devices. I also wish they had a power button and POE, hey maybe even a 2.5GB NIC or and SFP+ port instead of the 2 1GB NICs. Thanks for the review.
I've upgraded my Zima Board so much that now it's a fully autonomous Robot and it's painting pictures.... It started painting portraits but now it's painting the cosmos with a small blue square in the middle of the picture... Every canvas is slightly bigger than the last. Can someone give me some advice? I don't want to downgrade it though, I want to see where it's going... I don't want to switch it off either.
I and the teachers I support (k-6, 7-9, 10-12) have all switched over the past 2-3 years to other pi clones and used TFF PCs for students, With the comeback of $100 netbook laptops we support them, too. This board looks interesting for them, although double the price point we want for the kids. Since we are all Debian / Ubuntu based, this thing looks good...
I know RaspBerry Pi 3b+ is right not expensive, we have to pay 140€ and the ZimaBoard 832 cost around 230€. But what the most people want is a little tiny server with a tiny website were they can store some log-data, may be temperature or the statistics of the cat-door or the data from the beehive (weight, temperature, humidity). I do this with a RaspBerry Pi Zero W and he is consuming 0.25 Watt in idle mode and if I activate the camera to get a picture / video this are around 1.2Watt ! I use ARMbian at my Pi4 and "Raspberry Pi OS" on the Zero, can configure everything how I want. The community is big and I get a lot of help if I need it.
In lieu of overpriced Raspberry Pi boards and oversized second hand rack servers, I have been running a cluster of low-power mini PCs! Intel 12th gen N series, AMD Zen3 U series.. all good options, and I have RAM maxed out in these. PC market is in a slump, so they've been super cheap on Amazon as of late. Most Intel N series mini PCs have dual Intel NIC at a minimum, which is really nice.
Got a gamepi43 4.3" gameboy shell bundeled with pi4b 2gb for 130€/140$. Which is pretty nice. But pi's are now more available like a pi4 with power supply is 89,95€ right now.
Love this thing I use it as a general lab computer, its first use was a mini proxmox server. For some one who wants to tinker this thing is amazing for what it is
Gotta stop here at 3:08. I’m going to finish this because I want to see what else your bringing to the table however? The Celeron, your first comparison, isn’t an ARM based architecture. So, in my book, you immediately LEPT out of the category and made it an apples to oranges comparison. Not only do I NOT want to work with the architecture at home as I’ve had to for 30 years in IT, but my enjoyment in PI land has been primarily due to an entire switch in thinking to ARM/Linux. That said, I’m hoping the other choices, include the aforementioned architecture. Edited to add: I was under the impression you had multiple things to review but you stuck with, WinTel architecture. Not a fail, but, again, not comparable products for a hundred reasons.
8:23 I know you want Emby, and Jellyfin should be not new for you and maybe you just don't want another alternative. but it seems Hardware Haven is easily able to set external hard-drive up with Jellyfin and it's working fine, only small tinkering for hardware acceleration that not related with external drive issue. Video is w44CypRO5l4 on 20:20 timestamp
i set up casa os with plex yesterday to give access to external drive just click add on the right where text is you can copy path from file manager and copy it there
I liked getting Pi Zeros at MicroCenter on Pi day (March 14th) for $3.14. I ended buying a Zero 2 at the local MicroCenter on launch day for $15 and was dismayed by the fact they were charging more for each one you bought to discourage scalpers. Little did I know that over a year later it would be impossible to buy another one for less than $50
You are lucky, here in Germany they are all sold out since a long time. If s shop get hands on some, then they are expensive and sold out immediately. I hate this crisis, because I think this is all artificial.
So I took server 2016 off of my laptop and was moving it over to a Lenovo m710 small form-factor desktop and the damn thing would never update ethernet drivers (even manually), so I had to skip that idea. All I need is WDS. I guess I'll have to run it as a virtual machine. After I installed the VMI was getting random errors so that may not work either.
For $199 you may as well buy a NUC, there are all kinds of processors and memory configs available...and they have GPUs as well, so they're much more suitable for the kinda is things most people use them for!
I personally don't like the soldered mass storage. The whole board gets useless if that MMC storage breaks at some point - it's still flash with limited write-cycles, right? I would always prefer a swapable MicroSD.
Will definitely enter the sbc space in the future when the market readjusts, but as some have pointed out $200 puts devices in competition with a lot more stuff.
What if we abuse the PCIe lanes, In which we create a break out board, several of the small ones Connect PC to a small cluster without using network connections. You could then have the whole thing controlled by a larger CPU like an Intel Core or AMD AM4/5.
The issue with PoE is that at 12v you could only have a theoretical 2.5 amps from a PoE+ port (30 watts). In reality that’d be closer to 2.4 assuming some forms of inefficiency in the power conversion
Hi there I am trying to set up a system for streaming media, home assistant, some containers and light virtualization. I am thinking about running TrueNAS Scale on Zima Board or Blade with Jellyfin container. I am a bit worried about transcoding 4K tho. Is it possible to run this system I described and still being able to access and display 4K content from other devices? What about Dolby Atmos? Thank you very much :)
The things that suck about all of these raspberry pi competitors. The support for them is nowhere near The community for raspberry pi itself. Even if they took the exact same SOC from The raspberry pi and put it on their board. A lot of these operating systems that are just plug and play for the pipe won't work as well if at all. Also, a lot of people buying these raspberry pies have no Linux knowledge whatsoever. So if they run into an issue if they're at the whims of Google. And with a small support base you can't really find the answer all the time.
My plan is to recycle old desktops like Dell Optiplex or HP Prodesk into linux servers, computers that would otherwise be thrown and effectively generate e-waste. It's even cheaper ( most of the time free ! ) but it require to spend more time restoring and cleaning the hardware.
i plan to take a disused dual core smeleron/4gb ddr4/32gb emmc hp chromebook sans carcass and add an ngff to mini pcie adapter and THEN a mini pcie to quad sata adapter to it...i think that along with a cheap usb3 to eth adapter will get me a decent dual core NAS with four ports for around $100 minus case and disk drives...so long as the mpcie to sata adaptor works well (which i believe it will based on what ive read up on the controllers on it) it will be decent....though about going for a ngff to pcie x1 adapter and then a pcie x1 to 16-port sata card (with several switches, yup) and may still do that since i am looking for lots of cheap capacity but not high perf or throughput.........saves some ewaste from the bin too!
LOVE the fact that you pointed out some shortcomings while everyone else seems to be ranting and raving about them. I got an 832 for 160ish on Amz. The advantage to the FF and exposed PCIE slot is you can plop this thing on your desk and swap cards and basically monkey around VERY easily. "Hackable" is def a stretch too. I still plan to grab a couple of HP elitedesk G4's (or equiv Lenovo or Dell..maybe)for lab crap, like proxmox clustering etc, but dont regret buying this AT ALL given the "monkey factor". Plus, its REALLY cool. Doesn't need a case, as the design aesthetic is fantastic. Dollar for dollar, there are more powerdul and flexible options out there, but who doesn't love cool?
Technically it has some kind of power button, but i haven't tried it. There are some pins somewhat exposed and you can short them by screwdriver or something. Less convenient is to autologin as root at tty1 and to connect keyboard and type shutdown when needed. My issue with this is that 216 does not have much memory and power and higher models have alternatives. And lack of enclosure. With SATA SSD attached it's a bit messy (also internal emmc is not needed) I prefer having docker/podman, using VMs is a waste of disk space ... well with 1TB being cheap and one service having 10GB ... it's actually quite ok.
You can mount your external storage over the top of the directories on your internal storage where your uncooperative application expects to be able to save data.
If you have bought a product or not. The fact you have an incentive to keep good relationships with companies will always make any review questionable - this is true for all reviewers who are professionals. Financial incentives don't have to be direct money transfer but access to future products that will enable more CONTENT:tm: I really don't get how a youtuber of any kind can ignore this simple truth.
I'd love to but I actually need a Pi to run the CaribouLite SDR. It uses the secondary memory interface specific to the Pi. I'd prefer a Zero 2 W just to make the power usage as low as possible buuuuut I can't find one anymore.
I dont know whats going on in the US but 8gb pis with memory a case a charger and hdmi are selling at 130 usd cheaper still if you get 4gb ive never seen one sell higher than 105GBP
Just get used mini-pc(s) from HP/ Lenovo/ Dell for those price. You'll get much-much better perf. Although, they use active cooling. But you can underclock and undervolt, then limit the PL1/PL2 to just, like, 20w and tune down the fan.
I have five of these and have been a supporter since the beginning but the Realtek nics are bad, especially for firewalls like pfsense. I've had some running non-stop for over a year though
I think the software problems should be no issue, what raidowl did seems like a great a idea. I would say this is great for someone who wants a low power x64 without many bells and whistles
Korean Hardkernel Odroid boards are order of magnitude more thought out than RPis in terms of layout, peripheral connectors, power supply and heat dissipation. Especially concerning their rather modest price. And Petitboot is the best bootloader I've ever seen on ARM SBCs.
PoE would be a feature that would make me switch from my Pi4 2GB model. I run that with the PoE+ hat but that thing can be noisy. I suppose a PoE splitter would work on these Zima boards, granted you can find the right barrel jack size and polarity. Did that to make my Hue Bridge PoE.
some thin clients use the same chips if i remember corectly. they might also be found cheap sometimes especially used. tough one should doubble check what cpu it comes with if you are buying used
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Could you PLEASE change the sound in your intro clip to a CARBONATED BEVERAGE and NOT something FLAT like WATER???? Being that you are a COMPUTER and BEER CHANNEL you should at least make it SOUND LIKE YOUR POUR BEER and not Capri-Sun :)
Technically, pouring a beer should sound like nothing, as out of a tap, bottle or can, you pour down the side and avoid splashing or 'folding' of the liquid.
That makes for a pretty terrible sound effect, just like punching someone in a movie would.
Have a look at the Odroid H3+ (N6005)
How many streams can it transcode simultaneously at once? Let's say i want to stream a 4k 40mbit stream to 2 devices?
👍
Hey now!
YOU HEARD ME!
Fight fight fight!
It is why I've been gravitating towards x86 mini PCs vs the Rpis.
Zima Petabyte time?
The Jeff battle we all want to see.
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.
You also can't buy them. Like even microcenter doesn't have stock most of the time and they don't sell them online.
Intel SBCs never were any cheaper than that.
@@mgkleym I would like to have something like microcenter but the best I get is Curry's.
@@mgkleym According to an interview with Eben Upton (of the RPi Foundation) a few months ago, the Pi availability for consumers should begin clearing up this summer, and be fully available by fall. Whether retail prices drop back to pre-shortage times, who can say.
@@dktol56 I doubt that. Now that RPi has signed on with Sony, there won't be any consumer availability. Eben got greedy and started catering to corporations. RPi is dead in my eyes. We're better off moving to this, Orange Pi, or RockPi. All three are more powerful than the RPi with lower costs.
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.
Also if it's your thing they almost all boot licensed windows. I use one for kodi, launchbox, racecontrol.
I agree. I use a couple HP EliteDesk 800 G3 with i5 6500T and even expanded them with an M.2 2.5GBe NIC in the WiFi M.2 Slot and You still have the advantage to upgrade up to 64GB RAM and even the CPU down the line the G3 35W if I remember correctly would support up to a i7 7700T.
I get your point but there's another difference you're missing: Power Consumption. Any Dell Optiplex Mini with an i3 or i5 would have idle power consumptions way higher than a Pi or the Zima Board. Maybe not a huge deal in US but here in Europe can make a noticiable difference in the bill.
Yeah I would recommend Lenovo and then Dell. I've fixed way too many HP brand computers. They are total junk but I've never actually worked on a small form-factor desktop
@@wrathvenge no one buys windows most of the time anyway
not to mention many modern windows 8 or newer era pcs store the key in the UEFI
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.
I hope he notices your comment
Exactly, Jeff should try replacing "/DATA/Movies" with the path to his Movies dir on the SSD, etc.
Could he not just edit the YML file?
Exactly. This is a user knowledge error, not an OS issue.
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.
The pinout is on their site, a little hard to find. I put a switch on mine and one of the holes is a real challenge to desolder. A momentary switch will power it off and on.
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.
You can add GPIO with a pi pico to anything anyway.
@@edo386as well you can make your own board controlled by uart that can be used directly in code than adding pi pico which is RPi and unnecessary layer of communication
I agree here. It's not a pi replacement without onboard gpio output equivalent to a pi. A lot of people may use a pi in use cases that doesnt need gpio and there are better systems to use than a pi in that case but gpio enabled single boards was the use case pi was originally created for. Now you can build your own gpio controller or whatever but for most projects that's a huge amount of overhead and introduces another layer of communication abstraction which means you can't use software that was written for a pi.
Yes, I agree gpio is a killer feature of rpi, but I didn't use it. Another goodies are large community and documentation. Most of people are too lazy and too busy to play with something poorly documented. Unfortunately, rpi doesn't have pcie and sata. That's a pity. If the prices will be high, then the closest competitors will be old PCs or laptops. And nothing could beat em in price/performance + x86 compatibility category.
Cqn you point me to useful links? I use firmata on my raspi with arduino unos bcause of higher voltages.
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
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.
only 5watts???? really?
Are You doing everything from a single sd card? Even small hard drive consumes more energy.
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.
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.
@mipmipmipmipmip Depending on how much space you have for the machine, and what all you want it to do, you could go with a used office pc. A dell Optiplex 5050, with an i5 6500, 16GB of ram and an ssd for $140 roughly with 2 pcie slots for extra networking. It has an integrated intel nic and you could add up to 4 more nics per pcie slot as well.
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.
good choice!
For servers and pc uses yes but it has no gpio so its not a REAL pi replacement
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.
If it's designed to run that OS surely that makes it necessary to review as part of the process. If you have problems getting it to do what you want because of terrible / non-existent documentation that's a major stopping point for someone like me who has only a basic knowledge of Linux and relies on guides a lot.
The OS is a MAJOR consideration when choosing ANY computer to use for any project!
Countless uninformed people have bought what they thought was the "latest Pi replacement" only to discover they couldn't get it to boot, or not much beyond that.
Then, when they looked online to get help, there was little to no documentation, and the company that made it / sold it was not helpful or unresponsive because all their time was going toward trying to patch their firmware.
A solid user base is also important. How are you going to get the libraries to flash all your LEDs the way you want, huh?
Or, say you want to do something complicated like turn on a light or a fan when you press a button... Are you going to write that software? I didn't think so ...
All those factors are important.
Yes it was, but PCIe devices will have the same performance as any other system with an N3450 and Debian. OS is important. If Raspbian was useless I think the RPi wouldn't be so popular either.
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!
Damn.... I've got a couple of old notebooks that are begging for this. Great idea.
Upload something, I’ll watch it 😎
It doesn’t have to be super produced, we can watch at 2x speed
The thing with laptops and even desktops is they're not made to be on 24/7. If you can throttle power go for it.
Hey, how would you hook a laptop mobo to multiple HDs? I know there are some mini pci-x adapters to sata
@@vluri258 how can you say they are not made to be on 24/7? This doesnt even make any sense. I have 2 machines that havfe been runn ing for 4+ years straight and never get above 70C under heavy load and I havent ever changed thermal paste even. Ridiculous statement
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
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.
5:52 could someone explain this point to me? Not that I think I know better, I’m just curious what he means by Update Resilience when I assume you could just hold off on docker or orchestrator (like portainer) updates until all of your containers support a new version. And for Data Separation, idk, I thought containers that use an organized file structure both on the host system and within the container itself that reference to locations on the host system, then taking all of that data and doing routine backups would be a good enough “data separation” but maybe I’m just missing something here?
To anyone who actually answers, thanks! :)
Its ZimaBoard month! Watched that Raid Owl guy...not so sure about him yet though.
loving the lighting in this video, the warm lighting works well with your background wall.
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.
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.
re: Docker volumes, at 8:21 replace "/DATA" with "/mnt/your_ssd/Movies/" etc. "DATA" is just a placeholder.
I would love to see you embrace docker/podman more, seems like you're missing out on the benefits of super-light, super-portable containers.
Great review. I overlooked the lack of power over Ethernet in mine. That would have been amazing.
It's good to see you're still making vids after all these years & you're still smashing it!
What kind of QSV is built in? Is the performance usable for transcoding?
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.
8:26 You might be able to mount --bind your remote location into the folder that emby is configured to use. I remember years ago when I used the snap release of Nextcloud server it had the same issue of not having permissions to the external drive I wanted it to use. Obviously snaps can have those permissions modified, but I worked around it at that time by just doing mount --bind remotedir defaultdir and it worked just fine.
Decided I wanted a small server to take a few services off my unraid box. Looked around at Pi and the alternatives. Then said F it and bought an HP t630 thin client off eBay for $50. Mine came with 8gb ram and 32gb m.2. Dropped ubuntu on it and the network servers and utilities I needed and it's doing just fine.
Shoutout to Hardware Haven.
Absolutely! Colten is the man!
You can add a power button on the exposed solder points near the PCI-E slot
Just picked up a base model 2014 Mac Mini with 4GB of ram and an i5 for 70 bucks. Gonna give it a shot as a small file server.
The Zimaaboard is a cool product, but the most important part is. Is there a rack mount solution? If no, that's a dealbreaker for me.
My first thought too. I want a bracket for these that fits 2-4 in a 1u. Maybe 2u with sata hot swap bays below the boards.
Perhaps if there aren't, the community can design a 3D-printable option?
I mean y'all can just use a shelf right? Gravity mount to the top of that
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
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!
RPI can be powered by USB-C though? There are PoE USB-C dongles.
I will NOT stop bying Raspberry Pi's! ever.
I will buy each one of them!
I love the ZimaBoard 832 - I have recently installed 2 of them in my home lab with a third on the way. I agree that the biggest issue is the installed OS. However once I figured this out I have started fresh and thrown that away immediately. I have tried TrueNas Core, Open Media Vault, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Windows 10. Of all the I don’t recommend Windows (but it does run but slow) and CasaOS (too restricted). These are great, low power, silent, and relatively inexpensive devices. I also wish they had a power button and POE, hey maybe even a 2.5GB NIC or and SFP+ port instead of the 2 1GB NICs. Thanks for the review.
I've upgraded my Zima Board so much that now it's a fully autonomous Robot and it's painting pictures....
It started painting portraits but now it's painting the cosmos with a small blue square in the middle of the picture...
Every canvas is slightly bigger than the last.
Can someone give me some advice?
I don't want to downgrade it though, I want to see where it's going...
I don't want to switch it off either.
I'm a journalist, I'd love to come and talk to your robot about its art
@@dfgdfg_ It wandered off to another planet...
Buy a used thin client for 50 bucks. It has more than enough power for most tasks that people would do with their home servers.
I and the teachers I support (k-6, 7-9, 10-12) have all switched over the past 2-3 years to other pi clones and used TFF PCs for students, With the comeback of $100 netbook laptops we support them, too. This board looks interesting for them, although double the price point we want for the kids. Since we are all Debian / Ubuntu based, this thing looks good...
I know RaspBerry Pi 3b+ is right not expensive, we have to pay 140€ and the ZimaBoard 832 cost around 230€.
But what the most people want is a little tiny server with a tiny website were they can store some log-data, may be temperature or the statistics of the cat-door or the data from the beehive (weight, temperature, humidity).
I do this with a RaspBerry Pi Zero W and he is consuming 0.25 Watt in idle mode and if I activate the camera to get a picture / video this are around 1.2Watt !
I use ARMbian at my Pi4 and "Raspberry Pi OS" on the Zero, can configure everything how I want. The community is big and I get a lot of help if I need it.
The Zimaboard SBC is so expensive in the UK, you may as well just buy the lowest spec M2 Mac Mini and call it a firm W.
I am using OrangePi Zero 2, best price for the performance, also love the GPIO provided.
In lieu of overpriced Raspberry Pi boards and oversized second hand rack servers, I have been running a cluster of low-power mini PCs! Intel 12th gen N series, AMD Zen3 U series.. all good options, and I have RAM maxed out in these. PC market is in a slump, so they've been super cheap on Amazon as of late. Most Intel N series mini PCs have dual Intel NIC at a minimum, which is really nice.
Got a gamepi43 4.3" gameboy shell bundeled with pi4b 2gb for 130€/140$. Which is pretty nice. But pi's are now more available like a pi4 with power supply is 89,95€ right now.
couldnt you use setcap on the binary to set the capabilities for giving it access to your storage devices?
Love this thing I use it as a general lab computer, its first use was a mini proxmox server. For some one who wants to tinker this thing is amazing for what it is
7:06 , allows you to install but doesn't provide you an option to uninstall or any other advance settings
You could compare it against a box with a n5105 and 4 2.5gbit nics, it costs similar money.
This box offers a lot of hardware IO, but I wish it had M.2 SATA or PCIe (2230/2242) removable storage instead of soldered eMMC.
Does it support 3.5" drives? I'm thinking of making a 2 drive NAS with 2 big ol spinning drives.
Gotta stop here at 3:08. I’m going to finish this because I want to see what else your bringing to the table however? The Celeron, your first comparison, isn’t an ARM based architecture. So, in my book, you immediately LEPT out of the category and made it an apples to oranges comparison. Not only do I NOT want to work with the architecture at home as I’ve had to for 30 years in IT, but my enjoyment in PI land has been primarily due to an entire switch in thinking to ARM/Linux. That said, I’m hoping the other choices, include the aforementioned architecture. Edited to add: I was under the impression you had multiple things to review but you stuck with, WinTel architecture. Not a fail, but, again, not comparable products for a hundred reasons.
I bought a raspberry pi 4b 8gb for £79 a few years ago, and it's still the king the reason being the software fir it is amazing.
And has GPIOS
Love the HUGE trackball. Have several of those units corded and wireless spread about the place. Absolutely love them.
8:23 I know you want Emby, and Jellyfin should be not new for you and maybe you just don't want another alternative. but it seems Hardware Haven is easily able to set external hard-drive up with Jellyfin and it's working fine, only small tinkering for hardware acceleration that not related with external drive issue. Video is w44CypRO5l4 on 20:20 timestamp
Could a cell phone be repurposed to manage a simple home network? Like a 3-4 year old, mid-range phone through its type-C port?
i set up casa os with plex yesterday
to give access to external drive just click add on the right where text is you can copy path from file manager and copy it there
I liked getting Pi Zeros at MicroCenter on Pi day (March 14th) for $3.14. I ended buying a Zero 2 at the local MicroCenter on launch day for $15 and was dismayed by the fact they were charging more for each one you bought to discourage scalpers. Little did I know that over a year later it would be impossible to buy another one for less than $50
You are lucky, here in Germany they are all sold out since a long time. If s shop get hands on some, then they are expensive and sold out immediately. I hate this crisis, because I think this is all artificial.
Will it go with a K80 I bought during the shortages now gathering dust.
So I took server 2016 off of my laptop and was moving it over to a Lenovo m710 small form-factor desktop and the damn thing would never update ethernet drivers (even manually), so I had to skip that idea. All I need is WDS. I guess I'll have to run it as a virtual machine. After I installed the VMI was getting random errors so that may not work either.
I was honestly expecting you to be sipping a nice, vintage Zima--Jolly Rancher optional but encouraged.
We discussed the missed opportunity while shooting this one 😁
@@CraftComputing Missed opportunity? Sure. But at least your dignity and self-respect remain intact! Bwahaha!
For $199 you may as well buy a NUC, there are all kinds of processors and memory configs available...and they have GPUs as well, so they're much more suitable for the kinda is things most people use them for!
I personally don't like the soldered mass storage. The whole board gets useless if that MMC storage breaks at some point - it's still flash with limited write-cycles, right? I would always prefer a swapable MicroSD.
I think you’re forgetting about the sata ports
Do I see the PCIe slot is cut to allow longer boards to fit?
Will definitely enter the sbc space in the future when the market readjusts, but as some have pointed out $200 puts devices in competition with a lot more stuff.
Talk about the gear, like you talk about the beer. You have great info, but listening to you talk about the hardware is like watching the news.
What if we abuse the PCIe lanes,
In which we create a break out board, several of the small ones
Connect PC to a small cluster without using network connections.
You could then have the whole thing controlled by a larger CPU like an Intel Core or AMD AM4/5.
The issue with PoE is that at 12v you could only have a theoretical 2.5 amps from a PoE+ port (30 watts). In reality that’d be closer to 2.4 assuming some forms of inefficiency in the power conversion
How about a symbolic link to the 1TB drive on the emmc drive. Then browse and create folders from there.
Yes, stop buying Raspberry Pis … so I can get my hands on them. 😊
I bought 3 x 16GB RAM orange PI 5s which I'm running my home Kubernetes cluster on, so far it's been great been running it for like 2 months now
for emby, have you try assign drive on fstab and linking with ln -s?
Hi there I am trying to set up a system for streaming media, home assistant, some containers and light virtualization. I am thinking about running TrueNAS Scale on Zima Board or Blade with Jellyfin container. I am a bit worried about transcoding 4K tho. Is it possible to run this system I described and still being able to access and display 4K content from other devices? What about Dolby Atmos? Thank you very much :)
The things that suck about all of these raspberry pi competitors. The support for them is nowhere near The community for raspberry pi itself. Even if they took the exact same SOC from The raspberry pi and put it on their board. A lot of these operating systems that are just plug and play for the pipe won't work as well if at all. Also, a lot of people buying these raspberry pies have no Linux knowledge whatsoever. So if they run into an issue if they're at the whims of Google. And with a small support base you can't really find the answer all the time.
This thing needs a case where I can make a decent nas, and possibly mount a x1 PCIE card. That is all I am asking for.
Hardware Haven beat you too this!
My plan is to recycle old desktops like Dell Optiplex or HP Prodesk into linux servers, computers that would otherwise be thrown and effectively generate e-waste. It's even cheaper ( most of the time free ! ) but it require to spend more time restoring and cleaning the hardware.
Get around the power button issue with a LAN/WIFI controlled outlet where the wall wart is plugged in.
i plan to take a disused dual core smeleron/4gb ddr4/32gb emmc hp chromebook sans carcass and add an ngff to mini pcie adapter and THEN a mini pcie to quad sata adapter to it...i think that along with a cheap usb3 to eth adapter will get me a decent dual core NAS with four ports for around $100 minus case and disk drives...so long as the mpcie to sata adaptor works well (which i believe it will based on what ive read up on the controllers on it) it will be decent....though about going for a ngff to pcie x1 adapter and then a pcie x1 to 16-port sata card (with several switches, yup) and may still do that since i am looking for lots of cheap capacity but not high perf or throughput.........saves some ewaste from the bin too!
Pis are still king for the tremendous software support and versatility.
Love to see you do an update on this with the new software.
i think reason for not having poe is the added power reqirement for pcie ?
LOVE the fact that you pointed out some shortcomings while everyone else seems to be ranting and raving about them. I got an 832 for 160ish on Amz. The advantage to the FF and exposed PCIE slot is you can plop this thing on your desk and swap cards and basically monkey around VERY easily. "Hackable" is def a stretch too. I still plan to grab a couple of HP elitedesk G4's (or equiv Lenovo or Dell..maybe)for lab crap, like proxmox clustering etc, but dont regret buying this AT ALL given the "monkey factor". Plus, its REALLY cool. Doesn't need a case, as the design aesthetic is fantastic. Dollar for dollar, there are more powerdul and flexible options out there, but who doesn't love cool?
Love watching to see how low the beer gets as the video goes on
Technically it has some kind of power button, but i haven't tried it. There are some pins somewhat exposed and you can short them by screwdriver or something. Less convenient is to autologin as root at tty1 and to connect keyboard and type shutdown when needed.
My issue with this is that 216 does not have much memory and power and higher models have alternatives.
And lack of enclosure. With SATA SSD attached it's a bit messy (also internal emmc is not needed)
I prefer having docker/podman, using VMs is a waste of disk space ... well with 1TB being cheap and one service having 10GB ... it's actually quite ok.
You can mount your external storage over the top of the directories on your internal storage where your uncooperative application expects to be able to save data.
If you have bought a product or not. The fact you have an incentive to keep good relationships with companies will always make any review questionable - this is true for all reviewers who are professionals.
Financial incentives don't have to be direct money transfer but access to future products that will enable more CONTENT:tm:
I really don't get how a youtuber of any kind can ignore this simple truth.
Yeah, no. The whole appeal of the Raspberry Pi is its price, and thankfully it is deflating back to pre pandemic prices.
majority of people don't buy raspberry pi for it's performance, but for the huge community behind them.
But does it randomly lose all network access like all of my pi4s? I'm not sure I'm ready to give up that reason to drink yet.
I'd love to but I actually need a Pi to run the CaribouLite SDR. It uses the secondary memory interface specific to the Pi. I'd prefer a Zero 2 W just to make the power usage as low as possible buuuuut I can't find one anymore.
But for that price you can find a thinkpad x260 or a HP ProDesk mini with i5 7500t. Old laptops have the added benefit of built in UPS
What about ESXi - supported?
I dont know whats going on in the US but 8gb pis with memory a case a charger and hdmi are selling at 130 usd cheaper still if you get 4gb ive never seen one sell higher than 105GBP
Just get used mini-pc(s) from HP/ Lenovo/ Dell for those price. You'll get much-much better perf. Although, they use active cooling. But you can underclock and undervolt, then limit the PL1/PL2 to just, like, 20w and tune down the fan.
I have five of these and have been a supporter since the beginning but the Realtek nics are bad, especially for firewalls like pfsense. I've had some running non-stop for over a year though
I think the software problems should be no issue, what raidowl did seems like a great a idea. I would say this is great for someone who wants a low power x64 without many bells and whistles
Korean Hardkernel Odroid boards are order of magnitude more thought out than RPis in terms of layout, peripheral connectors, power supply and heat dissipation. Especially concerning their rather modest price. And Petitboot is the best bootloader I've ever seen on ARM SBCs.
Great video and explanation!! Keep up the great work.
PoE would be a feature that would make me switch from my Pi4 2GB model. I run that with the PoE+ hat but that thing can be noisy. I suppose a PoE splitter would work on these Zima boards, granted you can find the right barrel jack size and polarity. Did that to make my Hue Bridge PoE.
some thin clients use the same chips if i remember corectly. they might also be found cheap sometimes especially used. tough one should doubble check what cpu it comes with if you are buying used