The ZimaCube Pro might be a better proposition if you’re free to afford it.
Some of the issues talked about here have been resolved, although some remain.
In all other respects, these two options are identical.
We’ve tested plenty of thebest NAS devices, and for an N100-powered PC, this is very expensive.
It is so heavy that we assumed the drive bays were populated when it came out of the box.
Seven bays are under a flimsy plastic louvre grill.
The mainboard is accessible with the removal of four screws, and the top of the ZimaCube detaches.
One good design decision is to separate the drive cage and system areas for cooling purposes.
Therefore, hard-working drives shouldn’t impact cooling for the system area, and vice versa.
But more on that later.
It is a tiny and easily damaged line that extends the PCIe bus to the backplane electronics.
The other slot and the motherboard-based SATA ports are all linked off the same PCIe switch.
To say that isnt ideal is a massive understatement.
That amount is insufficient for those wanting to use virtualisation or docker modules.
It is DDR4 memory used in the ZimaCube, not DDR5, which can be used with this processor.
IceWhale states that this hardware can run TrueNAS or Unraid if required.
Anyone familiar with CasaOS will immediately be familiar with ZimaOS, a spur from that original code.
While it is now at version 1.0, ZimaOS is still very much a work-in-progress.
In our testing, we put four 500GB drives and a single 1TB drive into five bays.
But we still only ended up with roughly 2TB of space under a RAID 5 arrangement.
The whole solution is currently in a slightly odd place.
Things that normally come much later are already in place, like the AppStore.
Other functionalities that are generally taken for granted are either unfinished or missing.
But they arent finished, and some of the functionality needs to be worked on.
Its more of an appreciation of what the future might hold for the ZimaCube and its operating system.
Moving up to an N300 wont help things, as Intel also blighted that with just 9 PCIe lanes.
Oddly, this is the spec that another Kickstarter, Ugreens DXP4800 NAS, chose.
That Pro machine starts at $1,199, much more than the basic ZimaCube.
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