Zimaboard Server

[Billy Cromer]

Asa hybrid of x86 single board server and micro server, ZimaBoard is capable of many things. However, we believe no product can be good at everything. The long-term value team ZimaBoard seek will always be around improving your home digital experience and computing at the edge.

With ZimaBoard, you can build a personal cloud to have 100% control over your private data (e.g. family photos, party videos). At the same time, ZimaBoard allows you to easily expand to over 12TB disk space as your data grows. In terms of speed, the gigabit network in the local area network can reach a write speed of up to 100MB/sec, and enjoy the fast reading and writing experience just similar to the local hard disk.

By using ZimaBoard as a central authentication instance for VPN clients, you will be able to easily encrypt all your data guaranteeing maximum security for your most sensitive data in a private or professional setting.

Smart home services are split under various big brands, but this is never an enjoyable thing for users. People want to have a seamless experience delivered by different devices, but speaking the same language. Using HomeBridge and HomeAssistant hosted on ZimaBoard, you can easily bridge interactions between devices of multiple brands, making your door access controls, PIR sensors, TVs, air conditioning, and lights to be programmed and grouped at your will.

We understand how troublesome it is to sync large files via cloud or email. With ZimaBoard, you can set up a large-volume shared disk right at home or in the office with one click, and share your raw photos, videos, and files with others through multiple systems in real-time.

Do you love to tinker? Do you find inspiration in building something new? Zimaboard is a perfect choice for your projects that require computational power at the edge.

I got interested in this product as a home server option that was accessible to someone who's midway between a layperson and a proper tech/IT enthusiast. It seemed as though many tasks that are often annoying or tedious would be made simpler or unnecessary with CasaOS on the ZimaBoard.

For the most part that's true, and there are many aspects of this product that worked beautifully out of the box in my case - but as this kind of technology improves, I'm personally only learning more and more how inept I am at interacting with it...

The heatsink looks great and is practical at the same time.Under the most torturous loads I could only see the CPU being around 72C and dueto it being passively cooled it made absolutely no noise. With the case beingpresent, I do not have to worry about placing the board on my desk and scratchingthe table or shorting something out.

The performance of the SATA ports is what you would expect. When performingread operations on both SSD-s I saw the maximum total transfer rates hover around900-950MB/s, which is pretty close to the SATA III transfer speed limit.

I use a simple Prometheus Node Exporter + Grafana setup to view how much resourcesmy various servers use. My home server has lately either been an ASRock Deskmini X300 based setup oran old ThinkPad T430, and something that both had in common was that the CPU usage wasgenerally very low, mostly at or below the 10% mark. There would be bursty loadsfrom time to time and backup processes running that bump that up, but not significantly.

Memory usage of my setup was also quite low, with all my services and containersfitting into 2GB during typical usage. With this information and some CPU performancecomparisons done, I knew that the Zimaboard will likely be able to handle my homeserver tasks.

btrfs has had some issues in the past, especially with the RAID5/6 setup, butin my single and dual disk setups it has been solid for years, except for that one time around2018-2019 when I ran btrfs RAID1 over USB storage. To be fair to btrfs, thatwas a pretty stupid setup.

My ZimaBoard has replaced my home built ESX server that gave up the ghost after 10 years of constant running. Now, instead of running ESX, I have one ZimaBoard running CasaOS running my Plex and download dockers, along with Twingate for remote access ZTNA. It runs faster and uses a fraction of the power, without being a dust sucker. I love this little thing. I think a future purchase will be a ZimaCube so I can also replace my QNAP for storage. Very cool. Well done, team! Love your work!

Maybe I am not digital natives but I live with PC's since 12 years old in 1984 when IBM PC clone come to my home. Many years have passed and many operating system I've tried. For me Zima blade and Casaos was a quantum leap for home PC enthusiast and server lab machine to make me stay curious and relevant for this era.

I got interested in this product as a home server option that was accessible to someone who's midway between a layperson and a proper tech/IT enthusiast. It seemed as though many tasks that are often annoying or tedious would be made simpler or unnecessary with CasaOS on the ZimaBoard.

For the most part that's true, and there are many aspects of this product that worked beautifully out of the box in my case - but as this kind of technology improves, I'm personally only learning more and more how inept I am at interacting with it...

I took a while to write this review until after I stress tested and I have to say that I'm impressed. Not only does it make for an excellent 2bay nas but also runs everything I wanted perfectly through proxmox, to be fair this isn't written out of the box though I added a ripjaws and also a samsung ssd through pcie. The casaos installed on emmc I flashed ubuntu to for when I want to use the pcie slot for other things, such as to hook up coral for tokenized machine learning, etc. I can honestly say that I prefer my Zimablade over my rpi5 8gb. This is definitely a great product that more people should add to their arsenal.

Whether you are an expert or a novice, this Quick Start tutorial will take you through the basic hardware specifications of the ZimaBoard, the basic applications of the pre-built home server, and some basic account permission systems for debugging and development.

Thanks for the tutorial although it was not super clear how this sits between the NAS and a TV. Looks like a cool device, but concerning to add Chinese hardware to your network, this could be a deal breaker for me.

Currently I use the Plex app on an Amazon Fire stick, does this install the same way as a NAS directly by scanning DLNA servers of the network and the Zima board is simply plugged to a switch? Are there other devices that can do transcoding and use a NAS for storage?

I got my zimaboard, my NAS and my movies ready to follow your instructions but I just found Plex in the AppStore and I got it running vey fast, no command line required (I just hit a snag trying allow Plex to find my movies stored in the NAS) but other than that, is up and running.

While we are at it, I was trying to use these instructions to set up JellyFin, but directing to mnt/jellymedia location was not seen in the media folders. I was wondering if you could do a tutorial about setting up JellyFin using the CasaOS package from start to finish.

ZimaBoard 832 model is a low-cost single board server equipped with Intel Celeron N3450 Quad Core working distinguishingly as a 4T free charge cloud server or a 4K display media server. It helps manage onboard 32GB eMMC and 8G RAM storage data at high speed and well security with the standard interface and secure VPN.

ZimaBoard 832 model is a single board server equipped with Intel Celeron N3450 Quad Core operating at 1.1GHz to 2.2GHz which contains both the expandability of an x86 SBC and the standard function of a microserver. It can be applied as a personal Network Attached Storage(NAS) managing 4 Terabyte cloud charging free and the contribution is simplified that can be easily set up in 5 minutes. Meanwhile, the storage data traffic in the high-security single path by the configured highly concealed performance VPN. The user can apply it as a software router by tuning network with OpenWrt and pfSense wirelessly. Through internet streaming, the single board server has the ability to display 4K resolution ratio at 60Hz which means it can be built as an extra media server running with Plex. With the outstanding performance, the ZimaBoard single board server has very low energy consumption while it only costs 6W in Termal Design Power(TDP). ZimaBoard has presented a unique physical structure designed for passive cooling.

Additionally, the single board server has 8G LPDDR4 RAM and 32G eMMC onboard storage. It also supports both HDD and SSD with two SATA 6.0 Gb/s ports and one PCLe 2.0x4 interface. It displays with Mini-DisplayPort 1.2 while it supports 4K video transcoding with H.264(AVC), H.265(HEVC), MPEG-2, VC-1 decoding. It has been installed Linux system by default, and yet it is compatible with a wide variety of systems including Linux, Windows, OpenWrt, pfSense, Android, and Libreelec. It suits makers and geeks in terms of benefits, convenience, multifunctionality, security, capacity and compatibility.

CasaOS is changing the way families view modern living. From photo and video storage to smart home device management, and encrypted communications, CasaOS is the one-stop ideal home cloud system to keep families safe and protected in the digital age.

CasaOS is compatible with mainstream hardware platforms, x86 PCs, NUCs and Raspberry Pi, and provides enough openness for developers to participate in it. Users of CasaOS can host various home entertainment, streaming, network enhancement, and VPN applications free of charge, as well as centralize their personal data and sync 10x faster in a non-inductive LAN.

3a8082e126