Don't Waste Money on an Expensive NAS

My biggest issue with the Zima boards is that they are quite a bit outdated and lack the needed expansion for anything but a tiny home NAS. You basically get what you pay for but I don't even consider a NAS solution unless it can handle a minimum of 5 drives on the same HBA preferably with the ability to add more drives in an external enclosure bay down the road. For the modern average home user with an entry level homelab I would consider a 5 to 8 bay NAS enclosure a good start with a modern energy efficient offering from Intel (12th gen or newer) or AMD Zen (3 or newer) and the ability to handle at least 64GB of ram but 128GB would be ideal and a 10Gbe connection since 2.5Gbe and 10Gbe has become pretty common in the home lab space these days. If I was buying something at this point I would look more at their ZimaCube Pro NAS but it's a pretty hefty price tag for what it is.

Nice rundown of the positives and negatives of this.

Interesting, but no n100 CPU then no sale.

I think the tiny micro project by servethehome is probably a better bit of advice for folks to follow. Ex the hp g6. The ms01 though is by far the best micro option

Sometimes cheap is not enough - this could be "fun" as a tinker board to play with, but really it's not a great choice for a NAS or VM/Docker host with the obsolete CPU and limited RAM. (16GB is bare-bones except for very small applications, and there's not enough CPU or RAM to really go much further.) Generally the problem with very small systems, and even with the newer N100 based systems, is going to be PCIe lanes - once you start putting M.2 drives and 10GBe networking your I/O gets very tight. And then you step up to something a bit stronger like an older Xeon D or MS01 and the price goes up and you leave "tinker" land.

can you run Unraid on it?

Click bait. This is just a regular POC. Not really for all. .

So they wouldn't send you one for free, you couldn't have bought one yourself? Are you that hard up? Or do you just expect everything for free?

When you assemble this crap you end up with price close to sinology unit, without any benefits of sinology unit... Not my first choice...

Do you even do your research or just trying to justify receiving a free product to review. Radxa x4 just released a few weeks ago, N100, costs $60 with 4GB ram, similar size with raspberry pi. Try don't be a shill and be honest for once, people should not buy this in 2024 for that price. Unless they're fire sale it at $30, people should not buy and and you shouldn't encourage this practice.