Thoughts on ZimaCube? - "Personal cloud, re-invented" on Kickstarter reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- AssistBorn4589 · 2023-12-01 11:47 Sound kinda too good to be true, but none of what they are promissing is technically impossible. You can already get microitx case and stick 200$ NVIDIA card powerfull enough to run non-too-stupid LLM (the 'personal GPT') part and everything else is just your regular Linux-based PC. Power consumption of 6 harddrives may be an issue, and also cooling in such small form-factor. I would especially not dare to put such thing into clothing cabinet, as they are showing in the video. But it's very much possible, I'd say it's just too niche thing to be produced normally. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Azsde · 2023-12-01 11:57 Just get a computer with similar specs and install trueNas or unRAID on it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Get_out_mah_Swamp · 2023-12-01 12:17 The OS they show screenshot of just looks like casaOS ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Sem1r · 2023-12-01 13:03 It is casaos for sure ---------------------------------------------------------------------- InfamousAgency6784 · 2023-12-01 13:33 To echo what others have said, it's probably better to just built a computer yourself: NAS enclosures exist, actually-low-powered boards exist so you'll get the same but running under 10W idle. Being at 50W idle with all disks "down" for something that runs all the time, especially with a N100 only, is stupid. 6W in suspend is what it should be at idle with a N100! On that same power estimation video, they show the computer coming back up after sleep: minimum 65W with disks up! My old Asus CMS board with proper, but less efficient, power supply and containing 4 disks idles at 27W. Just to give an idea. I mean the whole point of buying a NAS box with unraid or whatever on it, is the convenience of drive bays and the low power consumption. A NAS box with a drive bay is trivial to buy now, so are low-idle-power N100 boards. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dazchad · 2023-12-01 15:12 If they can deliver, seems to be a good deal with the Kickstarter prices. 6 bay, 4 nvme slots, 2 thunderbolt 4, 4 2.5Gbps ports, and a low power CPU. If I hadn't a good setup already, I might've been tempted to back it. My Intel NUC 12th gen was $600 bare bones, and doesn't include half of that (although it is a super slim profile and have a more powerful CPU) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EverytingDead666 · 2023-12-01 16:43 I really wanted one I even paid £1 for the early bird access but the price just wasn’t worth it in my opinion. I decided to build out a meshiculous with 7 x 2.5’s instead which is more than enough for my use case and looks pretty cool :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- guesswhochickenpoo · 2023-12-01 17:08 The “killer feature” for me is the thunderbolt ports on the pro model in addition to it being a NAS. That’s hard to find and usually only on really expensive devices. Combine that with the rest and I think it’s a compelling package if you want fast DAS editing speeds plus full NAS capabilities, but even with that it’s too expensive for my needs and if you don’t need the DAS feature and other bells and whistles like the 4x 2.5 Gbps ports then DIY is probably the better route as others have said. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- GimmeSomeSugar · 2023-12-01 17:46 While they're prototyping they're shipping preview/review units with casaos. The longer term plan is branching into [ZimaOS](https://github.com/IceWhaleTech/zimaos-rauc) and having that ready for the launch of the Zimacube. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dazchad · 2023-12-01 18:17 While I agree Thunderbolt4 is awesome, mixing it with noisy spinning disks is not a good proposition to me. Having the thing on my desk is not appealing. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- guesswhochickenpoo · 2023-12-01 19:17 I'm mostly talking for photo / video editing workflows, which I guess I didn't really specify. There wouldn't be much point in using the HDDs directly with thunderbolt if that's what you're referring to. You'd use the higher speed SSDs or NVME drives for the active work and transfer to / from the HDDs when moving between different projects. So you'd probably only have to worry about noise periodically, depending on what other use would be taking place on the NAS side. Depending on the setup you could also potentially reduce the noise a lot by having it under the desk or in a ventilated / airflow'd cabinet nearby. With the performance of the Apple M series chips but small form factor computers it's more and more common to have an editing rig that's highly capable performance wise but relies on fast external storage for editing assets. Dealing with external USB drives is a huge pain and doesn't offer much flexibility in terms of other use cases or sharing assets with other machines or users. NAS along is great but unless you're running a 10 Gbps network it's not usually enough to keep up with 2K workflows smoothly. Hence a DAS / NAS combo nicely covers all the various use cases. You get the fastest possible external transfer speeds via thunderbolt but the features and functions of a NAS for sharing assets with other devices / users, running a media server, etc. It's kind of a dream setup for certain people (me included) if you can deal with the occasional or low level noise or suppress it somewhat. I was actually looking for a thunderbolt DAS / NAS combo before giving up and just building my own NAS. Since I've retired from professional photo / video work to just hobby and my back catalog I don't have a big budget to throw at the expensive solution and decided just to build my own NAS. Hopefully cheaper DAS / NAS options become available in the future. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dazchad · 2023-12-01 22:12 Sorry. I could’ve been clearer. Thunderbolt doesn’t have a lot of range (2m, unless you buy that $400 fiber), and the disks will make a lot of noise. My NAS is always audible, even when I’m idling it. I agree with your points otherwise though. Perhaps having 2.5” ssd instead of spinning disks would be perfect, although I wish they were closer in density to HDD. nowadays it’s better investment to get Nvm e if you have the slots