I Wanted This NAS To Be Good... | ZimaCube Review

[@phychmasher]

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 KZbinr.

[@HardwareHaven]

I was very happy to finally have my "Wendell" moment, haha

[@Arachnoid_of_the_underverse]

@@HardwareHaven He needs a cape

[@shadowr2d2]

@@HardwareHaven- I will call ☎️ this. Your IRONMAN 🤖 moment. Saving the Tech Community time ⏰, & energy 🔋.

[@NeptuneSega]

​@@shadowr2d2but it's Wendel that saved him...

[@RainMan52]

He's easily L3 support

[@JeffGeerling]

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.

[@DavidC-rt3or]

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.

[@HardwareHaven]

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.

[@Splarkszter]

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.

[@tim3172]

Were you asleep during the HP Proliant N40L/N54L and the Proliant Gen 8/9/10 MicroServer days?

[@sebastianseb8483]

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 !

[@ChristopherHailey]

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!

[@ROotHM]

Speaking as a backer, this is such an incredible bummer. Thank you so much for posting this through review

[@HardwareHaven]

I really hope they deliver a good product. I still think there's a chance that this is all just really bad marketing/comms.

[@ROotHM]

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

[@HardwareHaven]

Same!

[@haydenc2742]

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

[@filthyfrankblack4067]

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.

[@michaelgleason4791]

Wendell is an amazing guy. I don't know when he sleeps. I think he's powered by zfs.

[@ChristopherHailey]

ZFS is not fast enough to keep up with Wendell's brain :)

[@Nalianna]

He has a hyperthreaded, overclocked brain.

[@greensgarage411]

You are always fair and honest. Thanks.

[@HardwareHaven]

Thanks for the comment! I’m trying my best haha

[@bersissevimli1588]

Thats a really good jod I hope you keep it up.... ❤​@@HardwareHaven

[@jumpmaster5279]

It was quite helpful, I never thought of how much work goes into making such videos, please keep doing such great work 😊

[@HardwareHaven]

Thank you, I will try my best haha

[@germas369]

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.

[@HardwareHaven]

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 👍🏻

[@Gio-uo4od]

the technical explanation was great, so clear and precise. thanks for making these top quality videos!

[@HardwareHaven]

Glad you like them!

[@gustersongusterson4120]

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.

[@impy1980]

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.

[@ImCannibalOfficial]

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.

[@paulie-g]

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).

[@Raintiger88]

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.

[@DankyMankey]

The Zima Cube has a lot of internal features that I would find on an OEM computer.

[@FlyboyHelosim]

Probably because it's just an OEM/clone computer motherboard.

[@geistschatten]

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!

[@RaidOwl]

*grabs popcorn*

[@TechnoTim]

Great video Colten!

[@TheQuickSilver101]

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!

[@DIYDaveOK]

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!

[@ewenchan1239]

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.

[@jasonscherer2631]

Videos like this are important for people to see. This “looks” great but until information is accurate from them I wouldn’t touch it.

[@camberwellcarrot420]

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.

[@jasonscherer2631]

@@camberwellcarrot420 Software is a mess and I almost never ever get a prerelease game because of how they can be sadly.

[@nuclear-salmon]

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 :)

[@zyghom]

It is amazing to see how you incredibly improved your channel - great job!

[@ianhawkins4979]

Großartig. Was watching the Zimacube with mild curiosity, but sceptical about all the media hype.

[@bluesquadron593]

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.

[@davidg5898]

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.

[@panosangel2883]

I found this channel about a week ago and.. WOW. Great job!

[@rundeks]

Thanks for the great overview of the hardware and your journey! Greatly appreciate how open you are about this experience.

[@Kraaketaer]

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.

[@bitelaserkhalif]

Same with those Chineseium board H61 can have x16 gen 2, but they wired it to x8 instead

[@Kraaketaer]

@@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?).

[@briccimn]

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!

[@geraldh.8047]

Thank you so much for the time and sweat you have invested into this !!!

[@NapoleonVelascoCarrillo]

Excellent coverage of the product and the technical problems that you found. Thank you for this.

[@stevenh.230]

This looks cool but I’d only be interested in buying the bare case. BYO motherboard, etc.

[@haydenc2742]

now with that odd proprietary backplane plug...

[@frustratedalien666]

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.

[@MAD450r2]

When you purchase use hard drives where u buy from most? Im trying to rebuild an older unraid 5.0.6 free version so can only run 3 drives, no cache drive either. But the good part is you can run it forever. I have a paid version of unraid 5.0.6 at my dads where my brother collects blueray disks then backs them up on server to never handle the blueray again. At my house here i have free version setup with three 20tb drives so is my backup server its not running 24/7. The main server does run 24/7. The paid version has all 4tb or smaller drives in it. Have two 1tb ssd's mirrored setup as my cache. Been thinking about trying unraid 6 just to run windows or linux in dads kitchen where he has another pc for anyone to use. Would be better on power bill to shut off one of them, since servers up 24/7 and running a xeon 12 core cpu i should easily be able to split that up to run games or whatever on say 8 cores and leave the other 4 cores 8 threafs for unraid. If you ever like to tinker with older 5.0.6 unraid, i still have the usb setup file to put on any usb stick if youd like to try it or use as i have for many years is perfect for my backup only using 3 drives can fit in almost any case.

[@patrickmeichtry]

Thanks for you time and infos about the ZC

[@JzJad]

Wendell is that king of these things :D

[@Cynyr]

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?

[@vitoswat]

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.

[@Sphyxx]

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.

[@closednetwork]

I was really hoping this would be better. Thanks for the in depth review.

[@JPEaglesandKatz]

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!

[@DarthDweeb]

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.

[@Solkre82]

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.

[@mt_kegan512]

These are the kind of videos the true homelab community needs!

[@jackipiegg]

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

[@handspiker1994]

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.

[@HardwareHaven]

It's definitely a "wait and see" situation. A lot of cool ideas and features, but muddy marketing

[@paulie-g]

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).

[@zxcvb_bvcxz]

Nah, buy from a company that knows what they're doing

[@handspiker1994]

@@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.

[@paulie-g]

@@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.

[@ParkerTyler]

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.

[@dannymac653]

I have to say, it is a very nice looking case. I wish they sold it by itself.

[@clintcolombin]

I thik I'll stick to my plan of scrounged hardware in a NAS style case, thanks.

[@ACuteAura]

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.

[@thespencerowen]

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.

[@LazyBunnyKiera]

Thank you for the review. I think i should probably just DIY my own NAS using a consumer cpu and motherboard.

[@eIektrinis]

I'm looking for a motherboard with N100 and 4x NVME, or a way to connect 4 NVME drives... Are there any?

[@Nightykk]

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.

[@normang.827]

Thanks for the review, I thought really hard about jumping on this in December, glad I let it pass by.

[@sleepysloth847]

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)

[@metrotechguru5863]

Very good video. Thank you for sharing all the information on this product. Your review was very insightful.

[@tomazzaman]

I have no idea why this is the very first time YT has recommended me your channel, but better late than never!

[@zxcvb_bvcxz]

What are you using to make the diagrams shown here?

[@vonwerderc]

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

[@MrJmannik]

For me my interest lays in the pro model, thanks for this video it shows me the answers to the questions i had

[@garrettrinquest1605]

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

[@Coentjeeee]

Let's goooo zimacube HardwareHaven review 🎉

[@LtGen.Failure]

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...

[@srinivasprasad837]

Great work 👍 love all your videos.

[@HardwareHaven]

Thanks!

[@ahslan7304]

Lol, i totally would run Windows on this 😅. Storage spaces is just so practical

[@rudito22]

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.

[@Walaby50]

I would love to see a comparison with the base and the pro model in the new revitions

[@leadfarmer5563]

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.

[@JonathanSwiftUK]

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.

[@Phil-D83]

A case that is a copy of this, but allows me to add my own internals, would be preferable

[@AdamPrtn]

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.

[@shadowj5639]

What components are you using?

[@t4thfavor1212]

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...

[@gustersongusterson4120]

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.

[@rh4009]

It seems like they're spending their time and money on improving the product than polishing the marketing or spec sheets and managing your expectations. You should support this little company, and not hold them to standards of much better funded corporations. If 4GBps limitation on a 10G port is a deal breaker for you, then spend your money elsewhere. For the price, you get amazing value, and a product that is imperfect, but sounds to deliver on the promises, if not your expectations.

[@HardwareHaven]

I never said it was necessarily a bad product. But regardless of a company's size, it's important that customers know what they're getting when spending $700+. I wouldn't describe putting the correct info on a product listing as "polishing".

[@Tri-Technology]

Do you thin most of the issues are no problem at the pro model because it has more Pcie lanes?

[@johnm9263]

theres a lot of situations where it doesnt matter that you have very little connectivity, and storage is one of those, but when the network has to share it, you get a hit to both sets of performance, rather than a negligible hit to one or the other due to the way that networking traffic ends up getting sent, and data storage gets transferred its kinda the same way for some graphics cards, unless you are using the full bandwidth at all times, you dont "need" x16 and would likely be fine with a x4, if such were even available directly off of the CPU because thats the thing, every single time you go one switch, hub, or chipset away from the CPU, you add latency and overhead, which means you get less performance, hence why you dont ever get proper performance out of a x4 slot on a typical consumer motherboard, ON TOP OF the fact that the chipset shares that x4 lane with all of the storage and extra USB/network connectivity, meaning you have even less bandwidth you can use for your graphics card

[@mantisthefirst]

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

[@amp888]

5:49 I can only hope that ludicrously high idle consumption (29 watts with no drives) is a result of pre-production firmware/BIOS which prevents it from utilising lower C states. If not, and that's the true platform idle consumption, then it's atrocious in 2024. Just for comparison, I have a 1U SuperMicro 5019S-WR server with a Xeon E5-1240 v5 (from 2015!), 64GB of unbuffered ECC DDR4, and two NVMe drives. It idles at 20 watts from the wall with no hard drives installed, largely due to the fact it's able to utilise C8 package and core C-states. BTW, one handy Linux tool for helping to investigate PCIe information is lstopo (you should be able to install it via the HWLOC package on most distros); you can output text and/or graphical representations of the PCIe links in the system and what devices are attached to them.

[@GTDragonGaming]

I am watching this kind of content and realized i still have a hdd in my laptop... I feel broke 😔😔

[@Doordiekiddoqqq]

Bro you are lucky i don't even have a laptop 😢

[@ianhawkins4979]

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.

[@zpys]

ssds are so cheap now, you can pick up a 256gb for under or just over $10

[@lifefromscratch2818]

You're not alone.

[@zeendaniels5809]

SSDs are dirt cheap now... Just don't do your shopping in obscure chinese stores.

[@NNextremNN]

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.

[@Teksers]

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.

[@AlfaPro1337]

N300 (assumed that you are referring to this) is no different from the N100, it's still 9 lanes of PCIE.

[@DaleEarnhardtsSeatbelt]

​​​@@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.

[@HardwareHaven]

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.

[@Teksers]

@@HardwareHaven pico psu 300w is more than enough for those hdds, a few nvme and a laptop i3.

[@Teksers]

@@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.

[@keiz_]

Thanks for the video! I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on Ugreen's upcoming NAS products

[@PWingert1966]

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.

[@pharmdiddy5120]

Yep we need to take the bad with the good. We need these negative reviews to keep publication bias at bay. Great video! Still think these guys have potential but need to get their house in order for sure (edit for grammar)

[@Teleport73]

Thanks for another great video. Could you maybe do something with the HP Proliant Gen8 please? I keep seeing these coming up real low cost on ebay. Thanks

[@EmilePolka]

I actually have a N100 motherboard in a DTX form factor. Comes with x4 and x2 open slots of pcie. The southbridge basically handly everything else with x3 lane (USBs, NICs, SATA and other IO). works great so far, the NIC is only 1gig realtek but I already have supplied it with a 10gig aquantia card on the x2 lane and for satam basically using a LSI cards with IT mode firmware on it, that basically gives me 8 sata ports there on x4 slot. using it as a NAS, yes its doable, but with nvme ssd, not really. I have instead use a standard SATA SSD plugged in directly from motherboard as a OS and Cache drive. There's a NVME slot on it for storage but ended up not using it since its pointless (not enough pcie lanes that can make sense of it).

[@brucedeleon9103]

Do you use NextCoud for files and storage

[@CharcoalProduction]

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

[@jgz2]

Excellent coverage of the Zima Cube. Glad I didn't get sucked in. Thanks. Still waiting for my Zima Blade. It's been pushed back 3 times now. Disappointed.

[@etimacias]

This is the main problem with N100/200 - it simply lacks PCIe lanes, and the datasheet saying there are 9 lanes is misleading because they share pins with USB 3.0 and IIRC, only 5 lanes are available when you also use USB3

[@Nalianna]

16:26 i'm also finding it hard to source Thunderblot devices. :)

[@spexpl]

What do you use to prepare the diagrams?

[@denvera1g1]

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

[@Dunc4n1d4h0]

9:40. 70W? So my home server with amd 3700X, full ATX mb, with 4 Ironwolf drives, 32GB of RAM, many VMs running draws the same 70W.

[@jfkastner]

Very Interesting, Thank You!

[@e-2162]

one of the greatest intros I have ever seen

[@kingyachan]

I was so close to backing this but the price point didn't make sense to me.

[@camjohnson2004]

Ok looking at the PCIe issue, where is a way to be able to sort this out to a point where you could get, in theory, a much better PCI topology Broadcom does make the PEX8747 chip, its reasonably inexpensive, and could be used to sort out the PCI issues you could, from the N100 chip, steal 4 of the PCIe Gen 3 lanes and route them into the PEX8747. this chip will allow 4 Downstream ports of up to 8 lanes, however, by the topology of the board, 4 would be close to enough. To make sure all the high speed devices can communicate with each other, you would put the PCIe x16 slot, X8 slot and the M.2 slots connected to the PEX chip, from there you would use the remaining lanes from the N100 to connect the SATA controller AND any NICs the board comes native with. This would help eliminate the bottleneck as much as possible. While you wouldn't get full speed, you'd get away with far better bandwidth.

[@demorez5]

that backplane looks like it would support SAS drives. any chance you have tried this?

[@danielweith1075]

I think NAS not home lab for the version: Proto 2.0 with the hardware in hand, but not at that price.

[@MAD450r2]

Damn you are closer to me than i had first thought. Im from conneticut area. Well bristol ct now. I grew up in southington ct.