proxmox
Oh Winter Cube…
Oh Zima Cube…
#Winter #Cube..
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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.
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)
What a shit product, instant ewaste.
boooooring…..
You would think they assumed most people do not need full anything, as its marketed as a nas, and most people will not need high bandwidth.
Interesting non the less, and level 1 techs man really knows his stuff on computers.
But you have to remember this is being sold as a nas, and most people will never fully max there lanes on any pc, let alone a nas, so they probably assumed no one would ever get so deep into the specs as you did here.
I really like the formfactor though…
I love my Zimaboard but this is not what I was expecting from them
hear me out, zimacube, but with micro atx support for byo mobo+cpu+cooler
Third time this week I see a bad review that was based on the manufacture sending out the "prototype". WHY DO THEY DO THIS? Ruins their rep, and wastes views and creators time, please stop yall…especially for the sake of your kickstarters lol
Oof. Looks bad. Good to know!
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
USB 2? In 2024? Really? In my 2020 HPE microserver I run Proxmox from a Samsung USB stick with USB 3 on the internal Port.
I have to say, it is a very nice looking case. I wish they sold it by itself.
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 was really interested in the ZC Pro when it was first announced but the lack of RAID 10 really killed it for me 🙁
The issues with the video are entirely the fault of the project – if they send out a prototype board they need to be clear about it's limitations as a pre-production model and communicate those things to you and whether they will be changed
Expecting you to just guess without any guidance is absurd of them and completely misleading to their potential customers
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)
Looks like all those PCIe shenanigans are preventing ASPM from working / the CPU from going into low C-states, ma 7700K-based NAS draws way less at idle… or it's just BIOS issues/settings That will need investigation on the new boards cause that's kind of the whole point of going with a low power CPU like an N100, if you allow yourself more power draw then you can go to a full-fledged system directly.
What is their market with this I wonder… for 700 bucks you get a similarly spec'd Synology NAS which is like the standard of NASes out there, with same-week-response if not even next day responses, and without any of the PCI issues you mentioned.
Synology OS (DSM) is almost perfect, and even if it costs a bit more than the hardware is worth you get free support for the devices lifetime which is amazing, on top of most of their software being without a license.
I'm really not sure what the ZinaCube is trying to accomplish here…
So false advertising.
Nice.
Why send out a prototype product for review that is clearly not the final product? It would be the equivalent of having someone review the Apple 2 based on an Apple 1 board. What was he supposed to write in the review? Compliment the paint finish?
Wait… ZimaOS doesn't have a terminal? Out of all the points so far, the OS not having a console seems like an issue. (and yes, I know you can install anything on it)
EDIT: Haha nevermind, the whole cube seems like a mess.
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!
seems like this company is more proud of its enclosure and making a slick looking product than investing in the internals to get it to be performant. I believe there's a lot more value in terms of money and time spent to get some previous gen hardware and build your own NAS device and mange it. It seems like a pretty awkward space for a company to try and step into a "prosumer" retail storage solution.
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!
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.
The PCIe lane allocation is still rather suboptimal. Only one lane for the U.2 to M.2 daughterboard?! Oh, come on…
Remove everything on that ASM2806 and replace it with 2x 10GBe (each connected via 3.0 x2 to the switch). Take that one lane that exclusively serves the M.2 slot and reroute it to the U.2 to M.2 board. Cut SATA down to 2 lanes 3.0. Put the remaining lane into the x8 slot. The result: simultanous 2GB/s for SATA drives, 2GB/s for NVMe and 2GB/s for networking and 2 further extension slots worth (2+1) 3GB/s wired directly to the N100.
I found this channel about a week ago and.. WOW. Great job!
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
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 🙂
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.
It sounds like they really don't know what they're doing and should have stuck with designing a computer enclosure instead of designing a motherboard that they don't know how to do. I worked for a startup computer company, retail with software creation. My job was to evaluate hardware and fix software written by others this would have been a piece of hardware that I'd have given this product a no as it's not ready for prime time.
N100 is great low powe CPU, but I don't get why there are no homelab solutions with laptop CPUs – low power consumption (AMD) with much more performance and enough PCIE lanes.
Has the pro model the same problems is the only question in my mind ^^
I don't think building a product like this for home labs really makes sense. They competing with 4 year old think stations from ebay on the price front. If you are looking for features you can buy a current server main board and put it into a large PC case for less money, ECC RAM and IPMI beat a slick case in my mind. There is obviously still a market but it doesn't leave a lot of money they can spend on making a polished product.
It uses not much less power (10-20w) than my e3 1245 v6 in a ASRock Rack board (E3C236D2I) with 5x 10TB WD Red drives. And an Intel 10GbE card. And my system also have IPMI.
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.
I'm looking for a motherboard with N100 and 4x NVME, or a way to connect 4 NVME drives… Are there any?
Guessing wifi will move to intel connection only not pcie
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.
Seems like the moral or the story is to not let vendors dictate your timelines. Give them a reasonable deadline then move forward. 🤷🏼♂️
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
The whole PCI-E problem is a problem in the entire industry in an attempt to gatekeep and force everyone that wants or needs them to buy more expensive platforms.
You want more than 16 PCI-E lanes? Tough luck, better buy the Threadripper and whatever Xeon Intel coughs up to you.
Previously we had this luxery that you could buy a fancier chipset and get more lanes (X38 vs P35 for an example on the LGA 775) and we had cheap proper PCI-E switches later, some more compliant than others.
But the company that made them got bought up and moved into the expensive enterprise market and priced out of consumer motherboards, leaving us where we are today.
There is a reason that a lot of homelab users or storage nerds are running old enthusiast platforms like X58, X99, X299 and even the old AM3 platforms.
The PCI-E lane amount, even if it is just PCI-E 2.0, having 32+ opens up a lot of options for using HBA controllers and running the storage at intended speeds.