[HN Gopher] Zimaboard: The closest thing to my dream home server...
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Zimaboard: The closest thing to my dream home server setup
Author : hddherman
Score : 273 points
Date : 2023-10-09 11:10 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ounapuu.ee)
(TXT) w3m dump (ounapuu.ee)
| colordrops wrote:
| The perfect home server for me would be:
|
| * No larger than a very thick laptop
|
| * 2 SFP+ ports
|
| * 8 POE ports
|
| * zigbee, zwave, and maybe rtlsdr radio
|
| * large laptop battery as a UPS
|
| * built in TPU
|
| * decent CPU
|
| * at least integrated GPU, if not a slot for a discrete GPU
|
| * NVMe
|
| This would replace my large, noisy, power hungry rack with a
| single unit that would handle OPNSense, home automation, security
| cameras, and my various apps like photo management, nextcloud,
| mastodon, minecraft servers for the kids, etc
|
| I don't think anyone sells anything like this, but I think it
| might not be hard to build using Framework laptop parts, a cheap
| POE switch, and a custom built case...
| bdcravens wrote:
| > There is no native way to mount the two SATA drives to the
| Zimaboard. The creators of the board do sell a metal bracket, but
| it doesn't seem to integrate that well to the board.
|
| Funny enough, I just had the ad for the ZimaCube pop up on
| Facebook (holds 6 drives, up to 164TB)
|
| https://zimacube.zimaboard.com/
| justinclift wrote:
| Looked interesting, though there are some inconsistencies with
| the core count for the "Octa" version. The intro blurb up the
| top says it's 12 core, while the spec listing further down says
| it's 10 core.
|
| It's not clear if the ram is ECC either. With 6x SATA + 4x NVMe
| + 32GB RAM they're targetting more professional users, which
| should mean ECC ram is available.
|
| ---
|
| Looking a bit more in depth, it doesn't look like any of their
| cpu choices support ECC:
|
| [?]
| https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/226261/...
|
| [?]
| https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/231803/...
|
| So, that's a fail. Hard pass unfortunately. :(
| paldepind2 wrote:
| One thing I don't really understand about the Zimaboard is why it
| comes in such a good looking enclosure? If you want to use it
| with stuff connected to the PCIe/SATA ports you'll always need
| some extra enclosure/case anyway to keep things clean. At that
| point why not just ship a board like a Raspberry PI, etc?
|
| > btrfs has had some issues in the past, especially with the
| RAID5/6 setup
|
| I'm pretty sure that btrfs still has major issues with RAID 5 &
| 6, and that these RAID modes are not recommended to be used in
| anger.
| newsclues wrote:
| It's proprietary and easy mini homelab equipment for people who
| have an interest in home servers but not the time, skills or
| skills to setup their own.
| paldepind2 wrote:
| Yes, I get that and I think it's a very cool device (given
| that it has sufficient IO for ones purpose).
|
| What I don't understand is why the casing around the board
| itself is so well designed and good looking. To me it looks
| like a "finished" self-contained device on its own. But if
| you use it together with, say, 2 3.5" HDDs you'll surely need
| some enclosure around the enclosure. At that point an "ugly"
| Raspberry PI-style board would have been just as good.
|
| Granted, OP makes good use of the board enclosure, but needs
| to DIY a case in order to do so.
| newsclues wrote:
| Because they are selling a solution, not a single board
| computer for people who want to really tinker.
|
| It's for people who want to plug it in, follow instructions
| from a YouTube video and leave it alone.
| Havoc wrote:
| Probably has more to do with the teams preferences and tastes
| rather than any sort of commercial rationale.
|
| Same with the new zimablade - looks pretty sharp even though
| open air would cool better
| bluGill wrote:
| Because the enclosure is the heat sink. It has to look more or
| less like that for functional reasons, and so making it pretty
| as well is no real extra cost.
| zokier wrote:
| I do think that in 2023 1Gbe is starting to feel bit outdated
| when 2.5(/5/10) Gbe is becoming commodity. Something like NanoPi
| R5S has 2x2.5Gbe, and a nvme slot, all in nice little low power
| package. Sure, it doesn't have sata slots that OP wants, but I'd
| imagine similar ARM/Rockchip devices are available in all sorts
| of configurations.
| okramcivokram wrote:
| This one is x86 architecture, and if you need more speed,
| there's one 4x PCIe slot available for expansion.
| Havoc wrote:
| It's works but that slot is pcie gen 2 if memory serves.
| Seems to work fine with gen 3 nvme ssds at lower speed though
| naikrovek wrote:
| am i still paranoid about the news that supermicro motherboards
| were modified by chinese manufacturers to add spying hardware? I
| don't want to buy hardware anymore.
|
| oh, and for the record, fuck the People's Republic of China.
| jcuenod wrote:
| If you're referring to that rice-sized chip that was being
| soldered onto motherboards. IIRC, the authors of that piece on
| Bloomberg have a history of writing nonsense. This particular
| article got absolutely no external confirmation. The Risky Biz
| podcast had some good discussion around the time it came out.
| faefox wrote:
| > "I suspect that a similarily configured Raspberry Pi 4/5 with
| all the accessories added on top would result in a price that's
| quite similar to the cost of a top-of-the-line Zimaboard."
|
| With respect to the author, why would you not take 10 seconds to
| verify this claim? A cursory Google search shows that an 8 GB Pi
| 4 with passive case and PSU is ~$100 all-in. If you can wait a
| couple of weeks the Pi 5 offers a nice performance bump (and
| PCIe!) for about the same price factoring in the official active
| cooler and case.
| [deleted]
| hddherman wrote:
| Hi, author here. I went ahead and did the math based on
| offerings in raspberrypi.dk since that's the reseller that the
| official Raspberry Pi website directs me to as someone living
| in Estonia.
|
| Raspberry Pi 4 8GB: 92.87 EUR
|
| "Armor Aluminium heatsink case for Raspberry Pi 4": 19.01 EUR
|
| Official Raspberry Pi power supply: 10.80 EUR
|
| 32GB microSD card: 12.17 EUR (and on sale)
|
| At this point the subtotal is 134.85 EUR (~142 USD). Budget
| about 10-20 EUR on shipping on top of that, so about 150 EUR.
|
| And to run two SATA SSD-s off of the Raspberry Pi, you'd need
| an extra USB to SATA adapters. ICY BOX ones are quite good,
| those are about 15-20 EUR each, and are unlikely to work
| properly because of power limitations. I've done the testing in
| the past, one SSD is OK, two is a bit too much for the board,
| so you'd need to rig them up with external power, adding cost.
|
| To have something similar, we're looking at about 180+ EUR
| (~190 USD) worth of gear to replicate what we'd find with a
| Zimaboard, and with trade-offs and inferior results (USB-SATA
| is worse than plain SATA).
|
| I think it's a fair comparison, at least with EU market prices.
| teleforce wrote:
| Thanks OP for the breakdown of potential cost of similar Pi 4
| set up.
|
| Interestingly, based on the PiHut prices, the total cost of
| 8GB RPi 5, power supply, heat sink with fan (active cooler)
| and case will be around PS90. A high quality 128GB microSD
| card is around PS9 and that makes a basic server RPi 5 setup
| to be just within PS100. Add to the fact it has a spare PCIe
| slot for potential Gen 3.0 of high speed SATA interface and
| now the RPi 5 is even less power hungry compared to the
| previous version, the mini home server with RPi is very
| tempting, indeed.
| robsalasco wrote:
| How is the performance comparable to a rpi 5?
| zamadatix wrote:
| I think there is an over-focus on being fanless for silence and
| that leads to wandering down really niche sets of boards like
| this almost for the sake of looking for a niche board in itself.
| While it sounds extremely boring, a standard mini PC (called a
| "TinyMiniMicro" in this, Serve The Home phrasing) will almost
| always be a significantly better device, limit the fan speed to
| your liking (I typically go around 30 percent, can barely hear
| them with your ear up to the fan).
|
| If your goal is to 3d print a custom case, mount things
| externally, and tinker these kinds of things that's great but I
| feel a lot of tech folks get caught up in "tinkering" needing to
| equal "the best option". I'm not saying there is anything wrong
| with tinkering, I've actually got a few devices mentioned like
| the mentioned Flashstor 12 and it's a lot of fun to mess with. At
| the same time, I'd sooner call them my dream tinkering devices
| than my dream home server.
| viraptor wrote:
| I'm not sure that over-focus. Lots of small devices (especially
| older ones) don't have user-accessible fan speed control
| unfortunately and even if they do, fans degrade over time. I'm
| running one of the older NUCs as a home server right now and
| I'm really tempted to replace it with zimablade. Sure, I could
| replace the current loud fan, then play around with tweaks to
| slow it down while preserving the performance. But... I could
| just go passive instead. It's literally the opposite of
| tinkering too much.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > over-focus on being fanless for silence
|
| It's an "over-focus" on aesthetics, which in my opinion,
| legitimately matter the most for end users above all else.
| Every electronic category I can think of that Apple isn't
| dominant in already would improve immensely if all the players
| focused on aesthetics: e-bikes, displays, keyboards, mice,
| networking hardware, computer chassis, autos, ...
| asmor wrote:
| ZimaBoard has my favorite garbled mess SEO page.
|
| https://www.zimaboard.com/blade/resident-evil-village-coming...
|
| If you manage to decipher anything from this, let us all know. I
| feel like I'm missing out on the wisdom of Jerry, presumably the
| protagonist of Cyberpunk 2077.
| [deleted]
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| What is this, some sort of automatically generated attempt to
| have search engines associate their product with CP 2077?
| silvershell wrote:
| Whoa! What were they thinking... or not thinking?
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| This looks like a puzzle... or the output from a dysfunctional
| LLM.
| hiatus wrote:
| That reads very much like a markov chain-generated text.
| explorigin wrote:
| Nothing against Zimaboard but the best part of the article (for
| me) is his cable organization shown in his conclusion. So pretty.
| syntaxing wrote:
| The author is using an IKEA Skadis setup which is pretty
| popular in the 3D printing community. There's a bunch of prints
| available for it, highly recommend if you need a wall
| organization of some sort.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| There's a sub for that - https://reddit.com/r/cableporn
| pmontra wrote:
| We had this other post from the same author on HN time ago
| https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2023/09/07/ikea-powered-homelab/
|
| It's about the setup of the wall.
| methou wrote:
| For those who are interested in faster network, can look at R86s
| variants: https://www.servethehome.com/the-gowin-r86s-revolution-
| low-p...
|
| The 10Gb NIC is actually an mellanox cx3 series with OCP
| connector, theretically you can replace it with some more
| interesting cards like cx5/6, or solarflare's
| 7e wrote:
| Does it have IPMI?
| Havoc wrote:
| On a 120 buck device lol?
| aftbit wrote:
| If you care about the noise and size, but not so much about
| looks, you can also pick up a nice N5105 box for about the same
| price from Amazon, but with tons of ethernet ports available.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Firewall-Appliance-HUNSN-Barebone-Sto...
| syntaxing wrote:
| If they can update the CPU to either the N95 and N100, it would
| be the perfect machine. The current CPU is just too old.
| ferbass wrote:
| I've been running Zimaboard for the past one year and I have no
| regrets. I replaced 2 Pi 3 that I was using before go run Pi-
| Hole, Home Assistant and some other services. Power consumption
| is quite good as well, no regrets, indeed a good alternative to
| Pi and any other MiniPC.
| hidden80 wrote:
| [flagged]
| aftbit wrote:
| This looks like a nice home server if you have power, size, and
| noise constraints. I enjoy used enterprise gear personally, but
| my total power consumption is about 15x what this board uses.
| jeo123 wrote:
| 2nd hand laptops like those X and T series easily beat this
| server with some RAM and SSD upgrades. I got T430 i3 and i5 for
| around 150 dollars a piece. I dont see the needs of Zima unless
| you really prefer new crippled compute. Even using Zulu or Rp5 or
| Op5 make more sense than Zima.
| hddherman wrote:
| I've run the T430 as a server and it's faster, and a lot louder
| as well. That's the trade-off.
| dangus wrote:
| These little boards are neat products but I think they tend to
| compare poorly to used "normal computers."
|
| If you want a Zimaboard system with 8GB of RAM, you're looking at
| 200 bucks. You have to get the mid-range one just to get 4 cores.
|
| I bought a used 2012 quad core Mac mini which also has 2 SATA
| slots for about half that price. It idles at 13W according to
| Apple, and the person who sold it to me already had it upgraded
| to 16GB of RAM.
|
| This is a machine with the "Apple tax," i.e., a higher resale
| value than a PC.
|
| You can jump on eBay and have a blast with "HP EliteDesk" as your
| search term.
|
| I have to admit, though, a PCIe slot on a system this small is
| nice to have.
| Medox wrote:
| My compromise between pre-built Thin Clients and SBC's was
| building my own Mini ITX PC. The 17x17cm form factor has just
| enough connectivity for the size, even PCIe.
|
| The 2018 build came in at ~250$: Asrock J4105-ITX [1] + mini
| ITX case (with pico power supply included) + 2x4GB DDR4 + 128GB
| SSD. Runs ClearLinux and works perfectly 5 years later.
|
| The 2024 Mini ITX build will probably feature an Intel N100,
| like the Asus Prime N100I-D D4-CSM [2] at around 120$ for the
| board itself, but I'm still looking into options.
|
| [1] https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/J4105-ITX/
|
| [2] https://www.asus.com/motherboards-
| components/motherboards/cs...
| redder23 wrote:
| I actually have one, installed Ubuntu and Ansible-Nas on it. Here
| is me lsblk output: its supposed to have 32GB MMC space, I only
| got 14GB. I wrote them an email about it, they asked for
| confirmation of my order only to then ignore me.
|
| mmcblk0 ... 14.7G
|
| At and while I am at it, I can not access the docker services
| from LAN even though I can ssh into it and I can locally via w3m
| access the services like hemdall hosted thought docker. Any idea
| what may fix this?
| oneplane wrote:
| Zima is average-good at branding and maybe styling and that's
| about it. The hardware is pretty much random ODM low power
| designs, but based on ancient 2016 era releases.
|
| Maybe it's just a company in Hong Kong trying to offload old
| inventory, maybe it's something else (i.e. Intel SIPP), but I
| wouldn't recommend it either way, unless power is free and you
| really want to minimally reduce e-waste (which is what this is).
|
| You can get practically any later generation for the same (or
| lower) price with the same (or better) features but higher
| performance. Even a 5W design from Qotom from the same era would
| be a better choice.
|
| An example: an ODM has a X30G-N5100 which is a 4-core 4-threads
| based Intel SoC from 2021 with (LP)DDR4 support burst to 2.8Ghz
| and a TDP of 6W. Normally you'd not have them burn full power all
| the time and you're more likely to use 3 to 4W. It has modern
| features, modern security and mainstream support for all of it.
| And if that's too new for you, you can get a J4xxx or N4xxx
| series box for half the price of that zima, but double the
| performance.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Care to explain what an ODM is for this of us unfamiliar with
| the term? I'm not finding any particularly clarifying search
| results from the terms you used, AFAICT it's just a very broad
| term for manufacturers of industrial controller boards,
| embedded "Box PCs," etc. and doesn't refer to any specific
| product category? The "box PCs" would be most analogous to this
| product, but the problem with those is as a rule they do not
| sell direct to consumer, and even if you do manage to find
| someone willing to sell you one they come with a generous B2B
| markup. But maybe you're talking about something else.
| hendersoon wrote:
| It does have a PCI-e slot, which is unusual in competing
| products. But yeah, otherwise it's a matter of marketing
| particularly with the Zimaboard. Their new Zimablade is much
| more interesting; it's still old slow tech but they retained
| the PCI-e slot and dropped the price all the way down to $65
| US.
| aborsy wrote:
| But the selling point of this board is IO not CPU: 2X SATA,
| ePCIe and 2X NIC. You can run proxmox on it with TrueNAS in
| RAID1 and pfsense/opnsense in a vm.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Isn't putting TrueNas in a VM a big no-no?
| heatmiser wrote:
| Pass the underlying disk or HBA to be fully owned by the
| TrueNAS VM and you will be a-okay.
| lakomen wrote:
| A server without ECC RAM is not a server, sorry. It's a
| catastrophe bound to happen.
| WJW wrote:
| This makes me think: is there some sort of kernel plugin that
| ECC-ifies existing memory in software? Similar to how you can
| implement RAID in software.
|
| I even vaguely remember a kernel module (?) that transparently
| performed in-RAM compression so that you effectively used less
| memory at the cost of increased CPU usage. Can't find it
| anymore though.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > remember a kernel module (?) that transparently performed
| in-RAM compression
|
| Zram? https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/blockdev/zram.html
|
| It won't ECC your memory, but it can handle compression just
| fine.
| [deleted]
| pomstazlesa wrote:
| Ok, boom
| asmor wrote:
| Just remember, corruption happens outside the memory too.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| May not be a "catastrophe", but this is a perfectly valid
| point.
|
| RAM bitflips is one of the sources of bitrot. You may use ZFS,
| do scrubbing and what not, yet still end up with a corrupted
| data, because it'd be damaged before it hits the storage.
| dharmab wrote:
| I've seen a single bitflip cause a 3% error rate on a
| production service
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| _Home_ server though? People use Raspberry Pis for home
| servers.
|
| Speaking of which, guessing the Raspberry Pi 5 with PCIe is
| going to give the Zimaboard a run for its money.
| cramjabsyn wrote:
| Tbh second hand USFF or SFF PCs make excellent home servers. They
| have powerful x86_64 CPUs, are power efficient and can be had for
| sub $100
| pmontra wrote:
| If you care about Sata3 interfaces, the Odroid HC4 has two of
| them with vertical disk holders. https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-
| hc4/odroid-hc4
|
| The one I'm using as home server is consuming 3.48 W now with a
| Samsung 850 SSD (1 TB.)
| andruby wrote:
| I wanted to add the Odroid H3 here as well. I've got it running
| at 3~4W idle with a WD Black nvme m2 ssd. Standard x86 debian
| server installation. 16GB of sodimm ram (supports up to 64GB).
| 2x 2.5GbE ethernet. Passively cooled (fan optional). They sell
| enclosures with space for 2 disks. $129 (excl shipping)
|
| Great for samba shares and a bunch of containers.
|
| https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h3/
| derekp7 wrote:
| What speed can you get over ssh to that board? The big issue I
| had with the Raspberry Pi 4 when using it as a low-powered
| server is when I run my backups to it over ssh, the network
| transfers top out at about 20 MB/s (just raw transfer speed
| going to /dev/null) vs. around 100MB/s I get on a regular x86
| board.
| pmontra wrote:
| I benchmarked it right now by copying a 6.1 GB file with scp
| from my laptop to the HC4 SSD. It eventually peaked between
| 77 and 80 MB/s (that's a B for bytes.) I have a 1 Gigabit
| interface and a 10 Gb/s cable so it reasonably saturated the
| interface. There were maybe another 10 or 20 MB/s to squeeze
| from it but I won't complain. It took 1m 13s.
| jefurii wrote:
| I like the specs on the HC4 but that form factor just invites
| passersby to yank out the drives.
| pmontra wrote:
| A home server should not be concerned with passersbys.
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| A home server should really be concerned by cats
| tarruda wrote:
| Very cool, but I really like wall-mounting these ARM SBC near
| my router. This one seems unfit for that purpose.
|
| The argon one raspberry pi 4 case is very good for wall
| mounting, though it connects with the m.2 drive via USB 3,
| which kinda sucks.
| bobse wrote:
| What is wyse 5070 extended?
| okramcivokram wrote:
| There's also the upcoming Zima Blade that is very tiny too, quite
| a bit cheaper, with a SO-DIMM slot, single Ethernet port, and
| USB-C powered.
| thekombustor wrote:
| The Zima Blade isn't actually USB-C powered - it's just a USB-C
| port carrying a raw 12V. No PD negotiation supported.
|
| Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1bbD1kw334
|
| Honestly, for me, total dealbreaker for a product like this.
| Not only will it never work with anything other than the
| original PSU, that PSU will likely fry anything else you plug
| it into.
| mike_d wrote:
| Which is perfectly in spec. Feel free to email the USB
| Implementers Forum and let them know they are clowns and
| USB-C was a mistake.
|
| USB-C simply describes a connector. USB-PD is one of many
| optional power over USB-C specifications you can use, or
| choose not to use. Heck, USB-PD v1 supports power delivery
| over USB-A connectors.
| nrp wrote:
| This is incorrect. A USB-C power source can't be in-spec if
| it doesn't supply 5V by default. Other voltages or alt
| modes can be negotiated after that, but everything starts
| at 5V. This is defined in the base " Universal Serial Bus
| Type-C Cable and Connector Specification", not the optional
| USB-PD spec.
| thekombustor wrote:
| My understanding is that an in-spec USB-C power supply will
| supply 5V by default - then, upon negotiation with the
| client, can go up to a higher voltage.
|
| In the case of the Zimaboard, this is basically a 12V
| barrel jack with a different shape. It just dumps 12V out
| on the pins with no negotiation or considerations of the
| client device.
|
| I suspect if the downstream device was already 12V
| compliant, it _might_ survive, but I wouldn 't count on
| that nor would I be willing to test it.
| Daril wrote:
| After many years with 2 Raspberry Pi (3 version later upgraded to
| 4) I bought 2 Minisforum GK41 : 1 CPU J4125, 8GB RAM, 256 GB
| NVME, 2 Ethernet 1Gb/s, 1 SATA connector and internal slot for a
| SSD disk.
|
| It costed months ago more than 200 Euros, it is now available for
| less than 150 Euros.
|
| I am very satisfied, it is running Debian testing as server at
| home and office.
|
| The only drawback is the fan, but is very quiet.
|
| I measured the power consumption and it is around 5W per hour,
| the same amount of the Raspberry Pi 4.
| jpdb wrote:
| I really wish there was a device like this that could be used as
| a type of "blade server" that could be inserted into a standard
| 1u/2u short-depth rack mounted chassis. That would let me re-use
| my existing 8u wallmounted rack instead of a shelf with zip-ties.
| bsima wrote:
| Check out compute blade https://docs.computeblade.com/
| oktwtf wrote:
| I'd really like to consolidate my FX8350, 32GB, 2xsata ssd,
| 4xhdd, 4port gig pcie nic server into a lower power consumption
| device. I think if it had dual 2.5g nics and dual nvme, plus a
| couple sata built in I'd be happy. But more than one drive keyed
| m.2 for nvme on a sbc isn't common, especially with sata or a
| pcie slot.
|
| I tried a RockPro64, but it didn't quite live up to the task.
| justinclift wrote:
| > This variant of the board costs 200 USD ...
|
| Doesn't sound like a good deal when compared with 2nd hand
| microservers and small form factor PCs from Ebay.
|
| Things like these:
|
| [?] https://www.ebay.com/itm/175917817224 - 2x NVMe slots
|
| [?] https://www.ebay.com/itm/204477355543 - 4x 3.5" drives, ECC
| memory capable
|
| Note - I don't know those sellers.
| MisterTea wrote:
| The Lenovo Thinkcentre M720Q and M920Q have both an m.2 M key
| and an internal PCIe x8 slot you can stuff a GPU, quad gigabit
| or dual 10GbE into. No ECC though. Sells for about $100 on eBay
| for a decent one with PSU that is the same PSU as their laptops
| (Bonus if you're a Thinkpad user). You need a riser and rear
| bracket for the PCIe slot that can be found on eBay for like
| $25. I have a 6 core i5, 32GB RAM, a dual Intel 10Gb adapter
| and 2TB NVMe in mine. Idles at 19W which is 2W less than the
| rectangular trash can 10Gb Verizon router's 21W. Total build
| cost was around $200 for all used hardware.
| dheera wrote:
| I find NUCs kind of just work for home servers, consume a very
| reasonable amount of power (10W idle, 90W at full load, ~15-20W
| average in my case), aesthetically very neutral, and run
| standard Ubuntu distros with zero hardware driver issues.
| Everything works out of the box with a vanilla install.
|
| They're also available dirt cheap second-hand if you're okay
| with a generation or two older processor, and you can use an
| m.2 SSD inside the case without a dangling hard drive like I
| see with TFA's Zimaboard setups.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| These machines and the ZimaBoard absolute bottom of the barrel
| cheapo NICs, which are the biggest source of issues for
| networking devices.
|
| In my experience using all of these, if you want to have
| reliable networking, either use a Linux distribution that ships
| with the quirks needed for specifically consumer NIC hardware
| (like VyOS), or use a NIC that ships for the OCP platform (aka
| commodity hyperscaler NICs) like the i350.
| kjs3 wrote:
| Yeah...this really bites the folks that don't do a lot of
| networking and expect things to 'just work'. The forums are
| filled with threads that start with 'I have this weird
| bug/failure I can't debug...' that peter out with 'I replaced
| the NIC with a good one and problem went away'. Those crappy
| (looking at you, Realtek) NICs have all sorts of bizarre
| issues that the vendors clearly don't care about beyond
| 'works in Windows...ship it'. IME, if it's an Intel or
| Broadcom chip, you're probably fine.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > if it's an Intel or Broadcom chip, you're probably fine.
|
| You'd think, but a good test is to punch into google
| "e1000e proxmox issues" or "i210 proxmox issues." You'll
| discover that in addition to i225 issues another commenter
| is talking about, the Intel NICs shipping on the USFF PCs
| also have catastrophic issues in Linux and Windows.
| justinclift wrote:
| > if it's an Intel or Broadcom chip, you're probably fine
|
| From rough memory, Intel has a bad rep with chipsets above
| 1GbE speed.
|
| I _think_ the problems are with their 2.5 and 5 GbE
| chipsets (and not 10GbE?), but I don 't run those
| personally so don't remember the exact specifics.
| Jzush wrote:
| If you don't need a stupid amount of compute power you can find
| even cheaper alternatives. I bought a used Asus Chromebox CN60
| for $21, put $20 of ram(16gigs) in it and a $20 256 gig ssd.
| All in, ~$61 minus shipping and I have a small home server
| running CasaOS. Same as the Zima Board, I have it running Home
| Assistant, PiHole, a MariaDB instance & an image hosting
| website for my wifes project. It happily hums away running on a
| Cloudflare Tunnel. It's excellent! I had to set up my
| Cloudflare Tunnel manually but it has since been added as an
| app to the app repository.
| https://github.com/IceWhaleTech/CasaOS-AppStore/issues/158
| jcuenod wrote:
| I'm doing pretty much the same thing with cloudflared on an
| Acer cxi2 (Ubuntu server). I just use an external enclosure
| with on old SSD I had and it cost me about $20 with 4gb of
| RAM.
| aequitas wrote:
| I have the Gen8 microserver from your second link and what I
| really like about it (besides the 4 bays) is that is has ILO.
| Whenever there is a boot issue or I need to reinstall I don't
| have to drag it out of my server closet onto my desk, find a
| monitor and keyboard to hook it up to (now that I think about
| it, I don't even have a VGA monitor anymore) just do basic BIOS
| or GRUB stuff. It can all be handled via the web interface and
| the HTML5 terminal works great. Biggest downside of this
| machine is the power draw, even at idle.
|
| I couldn't find anything in the Zimaboard docs about it, but my
| guess is I'd have to find a mini displayport compatible monitor
| if I ever need to do disaster recovery of the OS. This
| especially becomes an issue with the eMMC, as you cannot swap
| it out easily like an SD on a raspberry pi.
| justinclift wrote:
| Yeah, I have a few of the Gen8's too, and agree about the
| iLO. Especially with the "advanced" iLO option, which the
| BIOS doesn't check the validity of its license key... so you
| can just look for an iLO key using your favourite search
| engine and you're good to go. ;)
|
| For fallback purposes I bought a VGA to HDMI adapter like
| this:
|
| https://www.scorptec.com.au/product/cables-&-adapters/displa.
| ..
|
| Not sure if that's the exact model I have (am in different
| location atm, so can't check), but the pictures in that
| listing look like the thing I have. It's worked fine in the
| times I've needed to use it.
| hddherman wrote:
| Author here. Yes, you can get a better deal if you don't care
| about the noise, but I value silence higher than having the
| best performance per dollar.
| Semaphor wrote:
| See my comment here [0], passively cooled thin clients exist.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37820458
| justinclift wrote:
| Yeah, that's fair. The first option there (HP ProDesk 600 G4
| Mini) do seem to have a reputation for being noisy, though
| replacing the fan with something quieter (eg Noctua) seems to
| be what people do:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/minilab/comments/zlowh2/hp_prodesk_.
| ..
| aborsy wrote:
| You can't compare used products with brand new ones. You should
| compare with a used zimaboard market price.
| justinclift wrote:
| Ebay doesn't list any used Zimaboards when I checked just
| now. :/
| 0x457 wrote:
| Yeah, you can when we're talking about home servers.
| densh wrote:
| While comparing server prices it's useful add 3-4 years of
| electricity cost of running it mostly idle 24/7. In europe new
| small power efficient SoC boards often win in such comparison
| over used socketed systems.
| linsomniac wrote:
| I have a couple of Dell versions similar to your first link,
| the Micro form factor. They are nice and compact, but they have
| heat issues. I have one running BlueIris security camera
| software and have to run it with the case off and an extra fan
| to keep it from going into thermal overload.
|
| The next step larger systems are probably a better bet.
| justinclift wrote:
| Thanks, didn't know that. Will need to keep an eye out for
| problems. :)
| alias_neo wrote:
| We don't all live in countries where electricity is near-free.
|
| In the UK, it would cost more in electricity than the $200
| Zimaboard to run one of those eBay machines for a single year.
|
| e.g. 90W 24/7 for a year is ~PS212 (~$258 US), 60W 24/7: ~PS142
| ($173 US)
|
| In this price range, power-consumption is a _major_ decision
| factor.
| asmor wrote:
| More reason to buy the kind of passively cooled mini PC
| people get as pfSense routers from AliExpress & co. You get
| Jasper Lake (2021) or even Alder Lake (2023) instead of the
| much older Apollo Lake from 2016. The only thing you really
| miss out on is the form factor and the PCIe slot.
| belthesar wrote:
| These machines are super attractive spec-wise for their
| cost! However, and maybe it's FUD, I don't really trust the
| power supplies or the firmwares on these units. I'd much
| rather pay for a system with a power supply that is UL
| certified and a system that, at least on the surface, has a
| much better chain-of-custody for processor firmware. I know
| I could replace the power supply with something UL
| certified, but that now means I'm contributing to e-waste
| needlessly. My eyes are currently peeled for a 12th-13th
| gen i5/i7 1L system in my price bracket, as between the
| heterogeneous cores to get solid power efficiency, the
| ability to drop 2x NVMe SSDs and a lot of RAM, and on some
| of them, even the ability to get 10 Gbit, I can hit my
| ideal performance per watt budget and take advantage of my
| NAS for high performance decentralized storage.
| dominick-cc wrote:
| I recently got one of those passive boxes with an N5105 for
| opnsense. But I found it ran pretty hot. I was able to
| replace the thermal paste and shim the cooler a bit to get
| it closer to the CPU (there was originally a huge gap they
| bridged with a glob of paste), and it lowered the temps a
| bit, but it still hung out around 60-65c afterward. I think
| that could be OK, but it still just felt too warm too the
| touch. I ended up placing a USB 5V fan on the outside of
| the case and now it sits around 40-45c which I'm more happy
| with. But now I have a fan running 24/7 running on my
| passive device.
|
| At the end of this ordeal, I bought another machine (MSI
| Cubi-N with an N200) for cheaper than the Topton Aliexpress
| job, which includes an internal fan. The fan is super quiet
| and the build quality is way better. And it comes from a
| reputable manufacturer which I trust more to not load any
| weird stuff into the bootloader. If I could do it again,
| I'd probably try to make my Opnsense router out of an MSI
| Cubi N with an N100 or N200, in both cases it would have
| been cheaper, more powerful, and use less electricity than
| the Aliexpress passive one. The only possible hiccup would
| be non-Intel nics that the Cubi comes with.
|
| Just some perspective from someone who recently bought a
| couple of these devices.
| aborsy wrote:
| And 2X SATA ports, although they may not have enough power
| to drive 2X 3.5" hard drives.
|
| You could do 2X 4TB SSD ZFS RAID1.
| alias_neo wrote:
| Can't disagree with you there.
|
| And I'm not a huge fan of the form-factor either, it gets
| messy once you've got your SATA connectors, power and
| ethernet.
|
| Not suggesting Zima is the right solution, but ebaying
| dated hardware often isn't either for many of us.
|
| Don't get me wrong, it's great there are people who can use
| this stuff and not pay disproportionate prices for
| electricity to run it; but much of the world isn't in that
| situation; maybe one day.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| The HP Prodesk is 12W idle though. I think the Zimaboard is
| 8w idle.
|
| I agree that power consumption is a big cost that people
| don't think about though.
| zekica wrote:
| 90W is peak power consumption for these. They idle at about
| 8-9W measured at the wall socket or $22-25/year.
| alias_neo wrote:
| That's why I included a 60W cost too. What's the point
| running hardware 24/7/365 is it's idle?
| tmpX7dMeXU wrote:
| This just flat-out isn't representative of what I'd
| expect a home server workload to be.
| MisterTea wrote:
| So you can connect on demand? My server is mostly idle
| too as it only serves me.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| Instant availability of the services provided without
| waiting on bootup, wakeup, or anything else.
| justinclift wrote:
| 60W might be right for an ancient desktop, but it isn't
| correct for at least the above microserver (2nd item).
| From rough memory, mine were under 40W (38W?) when the
| drives were spun up and active.
|
| And likely isn't correct for the minipc (1st item)
| either, though I've not got one of those (yet) to measure
| it.
| stavros wrote:
| My Silver Lake NUC runs at around 8 W (IIRC) idle
| (running a few services, but not actively serving
| requests). It's 30 W or so at peak load.
|
| Even my i3 NUC isn't that much heavier, consuming 15ish W
| (IIRC again) idle.
| firecall wrote:
| Because home servers tend to be bursty on demand
| workloads.
|
| If you doing something that is hammering a CPU at 100%
| 24/7, then you'd get a faster CPI to get the workload
| completed faster and you'd be back to having idle CPU
| cycles...
|
| Now RAM on the other hand!
|
| Free RAM is wasted RAM!
| johnmaguire wrote:
| > Free RAM is wasted RAM!
|
| ZFS will take care of that for you.
| dominick-cc wrote:
| If you want low power, check out the N100 systems that are
| out now. They use like 3W. I bought the N200 from this deal
| recently and it's a great little machine that can handle a
| lot of Plex transcodes https://slickdeals.net/f/16934029-msi-
| cubi-n-adl-dual-nic-in...
|
| It's interesting that these N100 systems can cost less than
| some of the Zima products. So for me, I don't see much of an
| upside of going with them.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Also, there are multiple SATA to m2 interfaces to get more
| ports on small PCs.
|
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/203655558873 (no relation with the
| seller)
|
| Although multiple SATA to USB3 cases should be a viable
| option too; I plan to build my next home server using one
| of them paired to a mini PC with lower power requirements
| than the one I use now.
| Aleklart wrote:
| It is not true, N100 system consuming 30w at full load (or
| 15-25w if set in bios), and around 7-10w idle. Previous
| generation atoms systems were around 20w max. Even older
| systems like n3150 - 15w. Anything USB connected can add
| another 5-10w permanently.
| layer8 wrote:
| The MSI isn't fanless though. For a passively cooled N100
| mini PC, look at the ASUS ExpertCenter PN42 or the upcoming
| Zotac ZBOX edge CI343. You'll pay a bit more than for the
| ZimaBoard though.
| doubled112 wrote:
| As I read through the article I came to exactly the same
| conclusion.
|
| I have an N95 mini PC that was $195 CAD, which came with
| 16GB RAM and a 500GB NVMe. It will also hold one SATA
| drive. All in a single box, although it is slightly larger
| and has a fan.
|
| The NVMe slot on the Orange Pi 5 I use also keeps that mess
| down to a minimum. Power + network and that's a finished
| setup.
|
| Edit: There are a TON of options in this space now. The
| value of 10 year old eBay gear is questionable at best.
| mmcgaha wrote:
| N100 and N200 systems are perfect price/performance for
| small servers. I am running a 7-year-old N3710 fanless
| laptop right now and it performs well enough for a few tiny
| sites and a postgresql database. I am pretty sure we
| reached this point ten years ago but I was too numb to
| notice it but low power devices have become powerful enough
| to replace the dedicated servers that we were spending tons
| of money on twenty years ago.
| kjs3 wrote:
| Once you get objective about what you're using that home
| server for, this is so true. Ignoring things like
| crypotomining or $FOO-At-Home gamified compute grinding,
| the vast majority of home needs are met by the lowest end
| processors. The J4105-based mini-pc I have running VMware
| isn't annoyingly slower (tho to be fair is definitely not
| faster) than the 10 year old server it replaced, but uses
| a fraction of the power and makes no noise.
| justinclift wrote:
| These idle at a small fraction of what you feel is the
| expected power consumption, so your pricing calculation per
| year is _way_ off. Far too high.
|
| The cpu in the microserver (2nd item) is socketed, so you can
| swap it out for something lower power if you really wanted
| to.
|
| For me, I've actually upgraded the cpus in my microservers
| (several of them) as I tend to use them hard at times. :)
| vanishingzero wrote:
| [dead]
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| As others have said 60 or 90W is just not true.
|
| Have a look at systems people have built or tested [0]. The
| cutoff for this table is 30W max.
|
| [0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18Lc
| Szs...
| orangeisthe wrote:
| 90W f24/7? Let me stop you right there
| SantiagoElf wrote:
| EU/UK slowly going back to the Dark Ages. 'Eletricity is too
| expensive'.
|
| What is next - I shower once per week to preserve energy :D
| Zetobal wrote:
| It's not the 00s anymore hardware can idle and handle light
| workloads without sucking the full tdp out of the socket.
| cramjabsyn wrote:
| They run laptop components so try more like 5-15W normally
| bluGill wrote:
| This is passively cooled. Fans are likely to be the first thing
| to fail on a setup like this. Plus it is likely you are running
| 24x7, and so fans means dust gets inside and eventually will
| kill things.
| Semaphor wrote:
| I got a refurbished J4105 8GB RAM thin client for 40EUR, 2
| m.2 SSD slots (though one required an adapter, and only that
| one is NVMe, so lets add another $15 for the adapter),
| passively cooled.
|
| The case doesn't look as nice, but still over 100EUR
| difference for a slightly faster, slightly newer CPU. And
| while not officially, it does support 16 GB RAM if I ever
| decide to upgrade. It does not have GBe ports, so that is
| probably the biggest reason to go with this board instead,
| besides wanting the sleek case.
|
| edit: It's the Futro S740
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