I Wanted This NAS To Be Good... | ZimaCube Review
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- Опубліковано 11 чер 2024
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ZimaCube Website: www.zimaboard.com/zimacube/
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Timestamps:
0:00 how to ruin a great idea
0:35 Sponsor - SNHU
2:01 The Zima Cube
5:32 First Boot and ZimaOS
6:40 HWInfo64 and PCIe Initial Issues
8:55 TrueNAS
9:52 UnRAID
10:20 Digging into PCIe issues
14:53 Marketing Issues
16:56 Ice Whale Responded
24:38 My thoughts and recommendation - Наука та технологія
It's funny that Wendell's channel is called Level 1 Techs because he's literally the level 2 tech for every single popular tech UA-camr.
I was very happy to finally have my "Wendell" moment, haha
@@HardwareHaven He needs a cape
@@Arachnoid_of_the_underverse"Not all heroes ___ ____"
@@HardwareHaven- I will call ☎️ this. Your IRONMAN 🤖 moment. Saving the Tech Community time ⏰, & energy 🔋.
@@shadowr2d2but it's Wendel that saved him...
It seems like we're entering a new era of Homelab-related hardware-in the past nobody made *anything* that was specifically geared towards homelab use (or SMB that just needs something modest).
Now we have 45Homelab's HL15 and the ZimaCube at the more 'priced at a premium' end, then wacky things like Minisforum's new MS-01 on the 'decent value networking-focused' side...
I think we're in the 'gen 1 era' right now (which explains some of the weird quirks like you mention in this video), and I hope in a 2nd gen pass, we'll see some devices that hit their targets on value + performance a little better.
When I first heard the name of this, and that there is the zima blade.. thought was that the cube might have the disk backplane like it does, but then a backplane for the blades.. Turing 2 style. Guess will have to see if/what a storinator jr comes up with.
Yeah, it's a pretty exciting time! Even with this launch being a mess, I still haven't completely lost hope in the Zima Cube. I hope they can turn things around. The chassis and backplane design are pretty solid with a few small tweaks.
All i want is non-overpriced systems. Why would i pay 500 bucks for a 15w CPU that i can't upgrade. It's just madness.
Were you asleep during the HP Proliant N40L/N54L and the Proliant Gen 8/9/10 MicroServer days?
I was just about to get the Zima Cube, but it seems that a lot of reviewers are not getting direct or at least some answers to their questions and there are also some "questionable" things about their product, which, to be honest, is not cheap to take a leap of faith with. Since there were a lot of question marks which "can or will be solved" in the end product I stepped down and went with another device. Great review BTW !
This is one of the best tech reviews I've seen anywhere. The explanation of the PCIe issues here was top notch and easily understandable and was actually a great explanation of PCIe in general. If someone were to ask me about how PCIe works I might just point them here. This was also a very informative and honest review of the product. I think people will be able to understand if this product will fit their use case from the information here. Nice!
Wendell is an amazing guy. I don't know when he sleeps. I think he's powered by zfs.
ZFS is not fast enough to keep up with Wendell's brain :)
He has a hyperthreaded, overclocked brain.
You are always fair and honest. Thanks.
Thanks for the comment! I’m trying my best haha
Thats a really good jod I hope you keep it up.... ❤@@HardwareHaven
Speaking as a backer, this is such an incredible bummer. Thank you so much for posting this through review
I really hope they deliver a good product. I still think there's a chance that this is all just really bad marketing/comms.
Likewise. I really love their ZimaBoards - and have even helped my less tech-adept friends start their own first steps in to homelab-ing with CasaOS. I can't imagine what the workload must be like for their small team with this much on their shoulders. I just wish they had a more dedicated web dev to help keep their site up to date, and the overhead to hire someone for comms so disconnects like this wouldn't happen. Fingers crossed for the final product!@@HardwareHaven
Same!
The beautiful part is..."IF" they listen to the constructive critisizm while they are still in development, and fix the issues and NOT rush to production with a buggy/problematic hardware issue, then they can turn this around...if they are just pushing it out "as is" but charging a premium for it...that is a problem
So this is where all of those NAS Demons on amazon where for. The Alder lake n100 is becoming the generalized standard for anything not AAA gaming.
The N100/N95 is more suited to a bare metal appliance application rather than a nas or especially a server imo. For a device like this it really seems like something more along the lines of a Ryzen 5700U would make more sense with 12 pcie lanes and 64gb of ram. It's also configurable to 10W TDP but can go much higher if desired. In retail prices this would add like.... $100? Seems worthwhile.
100% agree with you. I've got a QNAP TS-464 which has a N5105 in, close performance to the N95, (although I do have a N100 mini PC running my router), it's great for what it is, and handles data backups, multiple containers, CCTV recording really well, but I'm sort of at the crossover point, I want that little extra. I video edit, I want 10Gbe, full 10GBe, with QNAPs add in card I get 250-550MB/s, it's good enough to edit none complicated edits directly. But PCI lanes generally I'm stunted, M.2 drives limited to Gen3x1 so can only achieve 1GB transfer speeds, wasting the SSD speed of up to 3500, same with the PCIe slot Gen3x1 so the 10GBe ends up being split with the M.2 slots on the add in card. Also I have to Raid 1 M.2 slot from the motherboard and 1 on the add in card for best performance, coz raiding on either the 2 M.2 on the motherboard or add in card you're hitting bandwidth limit on the controller.
I like the idea of the ZimaCube case, where you're able to add in M.2 SSDs. I'm looking to experiment with a DIY NAS now, so I'm not facing all these bottlenecks we seen by the "turn key" manufacturers. I'm probably gonna look at the Jonsbo N3 case, potentially AMD Pro 5000 series GE CPU (if I can find one), and a (m)ITX motherboard, but do wanna double check the lanes. When I first got into having a NAS/homelab I was clueless about it, as I suspect many new comers are, with a ATX board that a PC typically uses, it's not even a thought usually, and until you start pushing the device, you don't realise the true nature of the bottlenecks. I would've happy paid an extra £/$100 for a stronger platform.
The crazy thing is, the AOOSTAR unit hh reviewed a month prior to this can be had barebones for about 300/usd with the R7 5700U, or if you can sniff one out, an R5 5500U. It makes a few sacrifices on expandability by not having additional PCIe slots and only 2 sata bays for 2.5-3.5" drives, but still retains 2x NVMe slots on the mainboard and 2x 2.5gb rj45 ports. For a simple homelab unit, I think it kind of makes stuff in the zimacube bracket pointless when considering the price to performance, when for the cost of a basic cube, a savvy shopper could populate all the drives and splurge a little on RAM to make a more than adequate unit out of something far less expensive than the cube.
There are plenty of good options. I love the N100 and especially the N305 (which is a beast), but the Pentium 8505 is a much better choice for this. 20 PCIE lanes, QAT, a lot of TDP headroom (I've tested it with a big power budget and, assuming you cool it, it screams). It's also cheap now (given the prices I see Chinese OEM router boxes with them go for) and still active. Has the benefit of having a P-core as well (which you can give a higher power budget to so it stays at PL2 for longer).
eDP is not a connector, its merely a protocol. the name of this connector is micro coax, I-PEX being the largest manufacturer of this connector in the world. Its used in high bandwidth applications like displays, cameras and like you've shown here, PCIe which is a totally valid application. depending on the model of the connector, they are designed to operate at over 20Gbps.
Thanks for the correction. To be clear though, my only criticism here is that it isn’t easily useable with other motherboards, SBCs, etc. I never said it wouldn’t work well 👍🏻
It was quite helpful, I never thought of how much work goes into making such videos, please keep doing such great work 😊
Thank you, I will try my best haha
The Zima Cube has a lot of internal features that I would find on an OEM computer.
Probably because it's just an OEM/clone computer motherboard.
*grabs popcorn*
Your PCIe journey is familiar to me and I pay much more attention to this now. Knowing how the system is configured is really important when you are looking at high performance devices (at the consumer level) and it seems these companies in China take a lot of shortcuts. I recently ran into an issue with my MSI Z790 motherboard with 6 SATA ports and eventually found that only 5 of them were actually directly connected to the PCH (which supports 8). The sixth port (probably due to the lack of space for the traces) was connected via an asmedia chip and I only noticed the performance difference because I was using SSDs.
I actually appreciate you not re-filming this. It seems like it was a bit of a disaster and the update lets us know how much of one it was. I like the general concept but the execution leaves a good bit to be desired. Thank you!
the technical explanation was great, so clear and precise. thanks for making these top quality videos!
Glad you like them!
Videos like this are important for people to see. This “looks” great but until information is accurate from them I wouldn’t touch it.
Kickstarters and their ilk, don't make a lot of sense to me. As with software, I don't think it's a great idea to preorder hardware. I prefer the old school wherein a company builds a better mousetrap, and people then beat a path to their door to buy one. Call me old-fashioned.
@@camberwellcarrot420 Software is a mess and I almost never ever get a prerelease game because of how they can be sadly.
The in-depth technical review of this is really great! Most reviews are just going to focus on ports and features, not the actual lanes and bandwidth availability like you did. Thank you!
Thank you for the honest review.
Not having enough PCIe lanes from the N100 is DEFINITELY going to be a problem, along with the disjointed and varied sources of information, which they are responsible for publishing.
Lines up with my initial knee-jerk reaction when first seeing this kickstarter - "That's a nice case, but there's no way the N100 can drive that kind of expandability". I didn't look any further (my DIY NAS is far more capable than this anyway), but it's good to see this looked into nonetheless. I'm honestly surprised that they're actually using PCIe switches, given that these tend to be pricey, but I guess that's why they're using very low lane count versions that ultimately render the "expandability" of this useless. This to me is the Achilles' heel of all this new SFF NAS/homelab stuff - it's based on mobile hardware with too few PCIe lanes to serve what such a build needs, with networking, NVMe, maybe a HBA, maybe a GPU, etc. It just doesn't have what it takes to run what it claims to run.
Same with those Chineseium board
H61 can have x16 gen 2, but they wired it to x8 instead
@@bitelaserkhalif My impression is that most of those try to add a (very useful!) m.2 slot to those old PCIe-starved chipsets, so they have to get the lanes from somewhere. But yeah, it's a tradeoff for sure. Would be nice if they gave you the option in BIOS to pick between full x16 but disabled m.2, or enabled and x8. And while that cottage industry of hardware repurposing definitely has its shady sides (weird non-compliant gpu configurations and so on), I really love that they're actually a viable way of keeping old but functional hardware in service - motherboards nearly always die before CPUs, after all. But they still can't do anything about those old chipsets just not having the PCIe lanes, and for some reason the low end chipsets seem so much more common than higher end ones (I guess they're stripping them from old OEM business desktops?).
Colten, for someone who doesn't claim to be a hardware expert, you do a great job of assessing hardware issues. Another great video, sir!
This looks cool but I’d only be interested in buying the bare case. BYO motherboard, etc.
now with that odd proprietary backplane plug...
Great video Colten!
Thanks for the great overview of the hardware and your journey! Greatly appreciate how open you are about this experience.
Excellent coverage of the product and the technical problems that you found. Thank you for this.
I just discovered this channel, and what a breath of fresh air it is! I love how calm and well-informed you are, this was a great video. I'm looking forward to future videos :)
It is amazing to see how you incredibly improved your channel - great job!
Großartig. Was watching the Zimacube with mild curiosity, but sceptical about all the media hype.
Great to have a fully rounded review! In my opinion a jonsbo n3 case with a motherboard cpu combo which suiting your needs is the way to go if you want this kind of form factor.
An other aspect which may need some investigation is the super high idle power consumption. To me it seems the cpu is not able to enter low power c states. Also not shutting down hard drives.
Seriously seeing better idle power with my nas with a 9th gen i3 in it.
I found this channel about a week ago and.. WOW. Great job!
Thanks for delving deep into this from the homelabber/techie point of view. The Zima Cube has a lot of promise and is a great form factor, but too much has been in flux to keep track of what is what and what the final version will actually have.
There were some not clear things I initially felt about that thing, but not clearly understood deeply.
Now I have learned the key lessons: always search and wait before purchasing polished things...
Thank you very much!
This is one of the reasons I went with the pro model because the n100 is not well suited for this application. The power draw seems excessive though.
Thanks for you time and infos about the ZC
Thank you so much for the time and sweat you have invested into this !!!
The N100 gets misused a lot, Intel clearly didn't want anyone to build anything with lots of IO with it. Would be cool to see some EPYC Embedded devices.
I was really hoping this would be better. Thanks for the in depth review.
Thank you for the best review of this device so far. I'm happy you have clearly laid out the pro's and con's better than anyone else. I am subscribed.
Fair call, Fair video, Im going to wait for vers 4 or 5
For me my interest lays in the pro model, thanks for this video it shows me the answers to the questions i had
Very good video. Thank you for sharing all the information on this product. Your review was very insightful.
Wendell is that king of these things :D
These are the kind of videos the true homelab community needs!
My favourite HH.
I've been a long time tech enthusiast with no access to enthusiast grade tech and been feeding on scraps to learn and maybe one day make it to the IT field.
After they fix the motherboard, I love the physical design of that NAS.
Good investigation btw. You wonder how these things get released when it wouldn't even pass testing vs it's own data points.
I thik I'll stick to my plan of scrounged hardware in a NAS style case, thanks.
Thanks for the review, I thought really hard about jumping on this in December, glad I let it pass by.
That case would be great as a barebones thing that you could put your own ITX/mATX board in.
Because the case seems to be of really good quality and has awesome features, but only having a choice between a bottom of the barrel n100, that costs kind of a lot, and a mid-range mobile i5, that costs almost twice as much, for some reason, is kinda succ.
There's room for a pico PSU and a taller CPU cooler in there for sure. Even if they have to lose most/all of the front I/O
Not with that backplane connector...with the odd proprietaryish connector it would not work with after market mobo's
There's nothing that suggest that they couldn't use an m.2 or oculink connector for a theoretical barebones version. As far as I can see, that eDP connector is basically the only thing that makes the Motherboard non-replacable, actually. The board looks to fit the ATX standard otherwise.
@@langam7017 the front io is also integrated into the motherboard (dell style), and the backplane power cable looks like it is powered by a proprietary connector on the motherboard
@@potatoes5829 Your point being?
EDIT: There was none, I guess.
Great work 👍 love all your videos.
Thanks!
Thank you for the review. I think i should probably just DIY my own NAS using a consumer cpu and motherboard.
I have to say, it is a very nice looking case. I wish they sold it by itself.
Very Interesting, Thank You!
Their non communicative skills and basically scamming the cube with the lane details give me a very, very bad taste... Thanks for this video... This company is now on my 'watch carefully and probably not going to ever be getting stuff from them' list...
Kickstarters working like this is sounding more like a scam.... Or just very badly managed project...
Not to mention this is not a cheap system at all.. AMF I find the pricing of this thing to be quiet ludricous.
Nice video.. This is very helpful and eye opening... ! Well presented good info!
I've been looking into building my own similar thing out of an old desktop. Originally, I was just gonna do it for price reasons. Now I think I might do it for utility too
What are you using to make the diagrams shown here?
This makes me really happy I didn't back it and went a custom built route with consumer parts. Wish them the best, but this is obviously a gen 1 product.
I would love to see a comparison with the base and the pro model in the new revitions
21:46
What about staggered power for sata? Do they have it?
I've seen new backplanes on taobao that has dip-switches to control the staggered, e.g. 200-500ms etc
one of the greatest intros I have ever seen
Let's goooo zimacube HardwareHaven review 🎉
I was ready to put money into the Kickstarter as a replacement for my aging Gen8 microserver. However backed out as more and more questions came up. Feeling good about that choice. Even the update from company seems to almost make it worse.
It's definitely a "wait and see" situation. A lot of cool ideas and features, but muddy marketing
There are plenty of 8505 and N100 (even N305) powered mini PCs that will do what you want, for much less money and available now, with plenty of reviews on forums like sth (the thing you most care about are thermals because these boxes, when ordered from ali, are practically non-returnable unless DOA).
Nah, buy from a company that knows what they're doing
@@paulie-g Mini PCs doesn't fit my needs for it. Gen8 has five drive bays and PCIe slot. The form factor is hard to replace.
@@handspiker1994 OK, and what's stopping you putting a NAS-oriented N100 mobo in it? I took a look at a teardown vid just now and there's every chance the new mobo is small enough you can kludge it into the tray if you're married to that case for some strange reason.
A great alternative might be the JONSBO N2, it just a chassis and a backplane, but offers an upgrade path and more compatibility with out all the constraints in the same form factor. not quite a 1:1 replacement, but still a valid option imo (Used the term backplane lightly since its really just a passthrough)
Thanks for the video! I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on Ugreen's upcoming NAS products
Nice and good review. Keep up the good work :)
Hey. Thank you for another kool video.
Id like to take advantage of the fact that we have quite nice community here so I hope you sir dont mind me asking about loosly related topic.
What software you guys use for home surveillance? I’m having a hard time with QVM pro on my TS-464 NAS.
I have a 4650G based computer that will eventualy land in Silverstone CS382 with pfsense or unraid (or both) and perhaps I should utilise that for home surveillance software rather than my qnap or synology nases.
Cool Explanation dude !
Glad you liked it!
They should just offer the case as standalone. Without the Type C in the front. When I saw the thumbnail I thought it was just that but sadly no. I don't know I feel that an I3 would've been much better, instead of the N100.
N300 (assumed that you are referring to this) is no different from the N100, it's still 9 lanes of PCIE.
@@AlfaPro1337I'm pretty sure they mean i3 like i3-13100. I don't know why you'd assume n300.
The n300 is different than a i3, because it's an n300 and not a core i3. The core i3 would bring many improvements over an n series.
The core i3 has 20 pcie lanes unlike the 9 on the n100 and 300.
They would need to also offer a non EDP solution for the backplane as well as some sort of power supply. It could get tricky, but is definitely possible.
@@HardwareHaven pico psu 300w is more than enough for those hdds, a few nvme and a laptop i3.
@@DaleEarnhardtsSeatbelt no no. I meant if they were to keep the design, I meant a laptop i3 which does not consume more power. Let's say an i3-1315U, 20 PCIE lanes is more than enough.
Lol, i totally would run Windows on this 😅. Storage spaces is just so practical
Great video. I think you were more than fair with your criticism of the device. Just feels like they rushed this thing out the door. It's a great idea and I would definitely be interested in a V2
As soon as the part about PCIE switches and how the x16 slot is x2 at best and the x8 slot is x1 or some nonsense I crossed this off my wishlist. I was super excited at the beginning though, but I didn't notice the name of the video...
I still don't understand this product. A cwwk n100 nas board (quad i226s, 5 sata, dual m.2, and a single pcie slot, ddr5), a johnsbo n3 case, and a sfx psu is a little bit cheaper last time i priced this. What do i get going this route?
Well for the cost of 2 nics you have 2 additional m.2 slots, 2 PCIe ports and proper sata controller instead of JMicron port replicator. For NAS only purposes this is much better deal than CWWK mobo.
A case that is a copy of this, but allows me to add my own internals, would be preferable
Well... i do like the N100 SOCs and i'm running three in total, as a lightweight desktop, router/fw and backupserver. but the limited number of PCIE-lanes and limited RAM keeps me from choosing these as a platform for my main homeserver. For this i'm still using the ivy-bridge Xeon platform...
I have no idea why this is the very first time YT has recommended me your channel, but better late than never!
Amazing work!
Thanks!
The specs being buried deep into the base product page is something that would make me avoid a product like the plague. I hope that they are a bit more up front about their specs in the future.
I am watching this kind of content and realized i still have a hdd in my laptop... I feel broke 😔😔
Bro you are lucky i don't even have a laptop 😢
Maybe you are. I switched to SSD in 2011 after my HP fell down a trench in Selçuk. And back then, I WAS a mostly broke uni student. Loosing precious data in a non backup culture had it‘s own learning value.
ssds are so cheap now, you can pick up a 256gb for under or just over $10
You're not alone.
SSDs are dirt cheap now... Just don't do your shopping in obscure chinese stores.
I'm looking at replacing an HP DL60 with this but this is still a prototype project and needs a few more years to develop fully. It has the potential to be very valuable for home use but needs time to get the software finished and debugged. I look forward to an updated review in the future when these issues have been resolved.
Great detailed review. Thanks for that. I was hopeful for this product, but… too bad
Is the limitations of pcie throughput due to the N100? If not it seems like they tried to use an existing board instead of designing their own pcb that addressed the desired throughput.
I'm looking for a motherboard with N100 and 4x NVME, or a way to connect 4 NVME drives... Are there any?
They designed the backplane connector like that on purpose to keep you locked in, given most of the off the shelf parts in there. Hopefully someone makes an adapter. Thats despicable
Also, it's impossible to find complete specs on anything from manufactures like icewhale, minisforum, beelink, geekcom, etc. I have yet to to a device from any of these mostly for this reason.
Just cause curious I put together a system within the $699 price bracket - EU prices.
You could build a Ryzen 5600GT, 1TB NVMe, 2x16GB ECC, ASUS Hyper m.2 for 4x NVMe devices, and an ATX board with PCIe 4.0/3.0 across the board -- though you'll still be limited to those 20 lanes - with the x16 being 4.0, and depending on the motherboard you'll get 3.0 or 4.0 on the rest (B550 vs X570) - even if some of them might do a bit of PCIe trickery. Throw in a random case of your choice, and you'll end up below that $699 price.
Sure, you won't get the pre-built, with a system basically being ready to just boot up. You will however get something quite a lot more powerful than an N100, and at those idle wattages shown.. you wouldn't get much higher, if at all, with that 5600GT - My own 5750G server idles at 30W.
You'd also get the ability to expand on the system.
If you squeezed out a bit more you could possibly go for a B650/Ryzen 7000 system, and you'd have some more future proofing, as well as PCIe 5.0/4.0.
To get full 10G u also may need to enable Jumbo Frames on your router/switch so you can have frames bigger then 1500 bytes
Nap and symbology also does use pcie switch but not that much :p
For them the point is to have disk throughput at same level as build-in network card, not above, because it’s not a server but a nas
It's a bit pricey, but probably fair for the amount of hardware you are getting, and the power draw isn't great. I'm looking for something small, 2 bays max, but with upgradable memory, low power, nvme slots, so for me 2x nvme, 2x 2.5" SSD, 2.5g nic. I just saw Ugreen have a Kickstarter NAS starting March. I won't touch Synology any more, they've lost it, home and lower end SMB don't have 2.5g nics, and it's 2024. I have an old Synology, Asustor and Buffalo Tera station, but I need to replace all this to get software updates. If you get a chance to review the Ugreen I'd love to see that. What's about a a mini PC running TrueNAS, I'm thinking that might work for me.
that backplane looks like it would support SAS drives. any chance you have tried this?
I was a backer and enthusiast but I canceled my kickstarter at the last minute. The real world power consumption was a deal breaker. I’m so glad you discovered the PCI limits. That’s concerning.
What Motherboard/CPU combo do you recommend ?
What do you use to prepare the diagrams?
Really thought this thing would be dope. Welp time to look at n100 mini pc and USB enclosures with separate compute box again...
this product holds promise......Wendell is one awesome guy
Kind of glad I kickstarted the pro version? Maybe? I will have to see the final result. Still I think there's too much in the box for just an N100. It's also interesting that in the N100 model the 6 SATA drives get 3 PCIe 3.0 lanes while in the 1235U version they only get 2. Some of the expandability features should have been scrapped to allow it to perform better at it's core functions.
Excellent work. Got my sub! ;)
Based on this video, I am SO glad I didn't back this product. I ended up building my own NAS (well, still building it) which outperforms the ZimaCube outright. Fantastic video.
What components are you using?
Do you thin most of the issues are no problem at the pro model because it has more Pcie lanes?
Thanks for pointing it out. So i'll keep looking forward for the Aoostar 6Bay witch should contain an Ryzen7000 series cpu wich should have enough lanes.
what would make this thing so much cooler as a concept, is the 10g port getting a 3.0x1 link, and taking the rest of those 8 lanes of 3.0, and turning them into 16 lanes of 2.0
Imagine a wider desktop chassis with 12-16x3.5 inch drives on 2 SAS controllers, and 6 NVMe.
Sure the NVMe would be comparatively slow, but realistically you're not getting a whole lot of speed out of the atom class anyway, even if you have the 8 core atom N305. IIRC my 10x16TB without caching, was almost exactly half way saturated on my 40G NIC(either slightly above or slightly below 20G)
This could make better use of the additional PCIe lanes of the Pro model
Do you use NextCoud for files and storage
this is good journalism
they might be sharing a prototype to get feedback on what things need improvment or changed out all together using a display connection for pci e cards is certainly a need to be swapped for sure