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> This variant of the board costs 200 USD ... Doesn't sound like a good deal when compared with 2nd hand microservers and small form factor PCs from Ebay. Thi

> This variant of the board costs 200 USD ... Doesn't sound like a good deal when compared with 2nd hand microservers and small form factor PCs from Ebay. Things like these: ∙ https://www.ebay.com/itm/175917817224 https://www.ebay.com/itm/175917817224 ⇦ 2x NVMe slots ∙ https://www.ebay.com/itm/204477355543 https://www.ebay.com/itm/204477355543 ⇦ 4x 3.5" drives, ECC memory capable Note - I don't know those sellers.

hddherman 3y ago
Author here. Yes, you can get a better deal if you don't care about the noise, but I value silence higher than having the best performance per dollar.
- justinclift 3y ago
  Yeah, that's fair. The first option there (HP ProDesk 600 G4 Mini) do seem to have a reputation for being noisy, though replacing the fan with something quieter (eg Noctua) seems to be what people do: https://www.reddit.com/r/minilab/comments/zlowh2/hp_prodesk_600_g4_mini_reduce_fan_noise/ https://www.reddit.com/r/minilab/comments/zlowh2/hp_prodesk_...
- Semaphor 3y ago
  See my comment here [0], passively cooled thin clients exist. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37820458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37820458
densh 3y ago
While comparing server prices it’s useful add 3-4 years of electricity cost of running it mostly idle 24/7. In europe new small power efficient SoC boards often win in such comparison over used socketed systems.
linsomniac 3y ago
I have a couple of Dell versions similar to your first link, the Micro form factor. They are nice and compact, but they have heat issues. I have one running BlueIris security camera software and have to run it with the case off and an extra fan to keep it from going into thermal overload. The next step larger systems are probably a better bet.
- justinclift 3y ago
  Thanks, didn't know that. Will need to keep an eye out for problems. :)
alias_neo 3y ago
We don't all live in countries where electricity is near-free. In the UK, it would cost more in electricity than the $200 Zimaboard to run one of those eBay machines for a single year. e.g. 90W 24/7 for a year is ~£212 (~$258 US), 60W 24/7: ~£142 ($173 US) In this price range, power-consumption is a _major_ decision factor.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  The HP Prodesk is 12W idle though. I think the Zimaboard is 8w idle. I agree that power consumption is a big cost that people don’t think about though.
- zekica 3y ago
  90W is peak power consumption for these. They idle at about 8-9W measured at the wall socket or $22-25/year.
  - alias_neo 3y ago
    That's why I included a 60W cost too. What's the point running hardware 24/7/365 is it's idle?
    - MisterTea 3y ago
      So you can connect on demand? My server is mostly idle too as it only serves me.
    - sjsdaiuasgdia 3y ago
      Instant availability of the services provided without waiting on bootup, wakeup, or anything else.
    - firecall 3y ago
      Because home servers tend to be bursty on demand workloads. If you doing something that is hammering a CPU at 100% 24/7, then you’d get a faster CPI to get the workload completed faster and you’d be back to having idle CPU cycles… Now RAM on the other hand! Free RAM is wasted RAM!
bluGill 3y ago
This is passively cooled. Fans are likely to be the first thing to fail on a setup like this. Plus it is likely you are running 24x7, and so fans means dust gets inside and eventually will kill things.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  I got a refurbished J4105 8GB RAM thin client for 40€, 2 m.2 SSD slots (though one required an adapter, and only that one is NVMe, so lets add another $15 for the adapter), passively cooled. The case doesn’t look as nice, but still over 100€ difference for a slightly faster, slightly newer CPU. And while not officially, it does support 16 GB RAM if I ever decide to upgrade. It does not have GBe ports, so that is probably the biggest reason to go with this board instead, besides wanting the sleek case. edit: It’s the Futro S740
MisterTea 3y ago
The Lenovo Thinkcentre M720Q and M920Q have both an m.2 M key and an internal PCIe x8 slot you can stuff a GPU, quad gigabit or dual 10GbE into. No ECC though. Sells for about $100 on eBay for a decent one with PSU that is the same PSU as their laptops (Bonus if you're a Thinkpad user). You need a riser and rear bracket for the PCIe slot that can be found on eBay for like $25. I have a 6 core i5, 32GB RAM, a dual Intel 10Gb adapter and 2TB NVMe in mine. Idles at 19W which is 2W less than the rectangular trash can 10Gb Verizon router's 21W. Total build cost was around $200 for all used hardware.
- nirav72 3y ago
  The lenovo m720q is amazing little machines. I’m using it with a 2 x 2.5 gbps QNap nic and running OpnSense. It’s been almost a year and it has been rock solid as a router. Before I discovered the m720q , I had no idea that a 8 lane PCie slot was possible in a mini-pc that small.
- vladvasiliu 3y ago
  I have a 4x1Gb i350 in my SFF EliteDesk and it can get quite warm. I've had to install an aftermarket small fan for peace of mind, since the case only has a CPU and a PSU fan which don't create any airflow over the extension cards. How's a dual 10 GbE faring in the even smaller enclosure of those Lenovos? What's the noise situation? I wanted to switch my router and random home VM needs to an EliteDesk mini I have lying around but it only has a Gb port, so I was looking at thunderbolt 10 GbE adapters, but seeing how pricy they are, might as well get a new complete box.
  - MisterTea 3y ago
    I've yet to really beat on it but it's quiet for its size with a typical laptop like fan sound under load. The dual port 10Gb intel nic doesn't seem to add much heat though I purposefully went with an SFP card in order to use cooler running fiber SFP's (A copper SFP runs burning hot vs a warm fiber SFP). A brand new dual port 10Gb SFP card costs like $100 USD. Used is far less. I also wound up realizing that when it comes to 10Gb, copper can be more costly than fiber and uses more power per port. So I only buy SFP+ gear so I can use one of many interfaces: copper, fiber, DAC, etc. Fiber and DAC cables are cheaper and use less power. I have a ~$250 USD 8 port Mikrotik 10Gb SFP+ switch and also bought a few cheap 10Gb mellanox SFP cards for my server, desktop and work bench PC for like $30 each off ebay (I use them in Linux and FreeBSD.)
aborsy 3y ago
You can’t compare used products with brand new ones. You should compare with a used zimaboard market price.
- justinclift 3y ago
  Ebay doesn't list any used Zimaboards when I checked just now. :/
- 0x457 3y ago
  Yeah, you can when we're talking about home servers.
doctorpangloss 3y ago
These machines and the ZimaBoard absolute bottom of the barrel cheapo NICs, which are the biggest source of issues for networking devices. In my experience using all of these, if you want to have reliable networking, either use a Linux distribution that ships with the quirks needed for specifically consumer NIC hardware (like VyOS), or use a NIC that ships for the OCP platform (aka commodity hyperscaler NICs) like the i350.
- kjs3 3y ago
  Yeah...this really bites the folks that don't do a lot of networking and expect things to 'just work'. The forums are filled with threads that start with 'I have this weird bug/failure I can't debug...' that peter out with 'I replaced the NIC with a good one and problem went away'. Those crappy (looking at you, Realtek) NICs have all sorts of bizarre issues that the vendors clearly don't care about beyond 'works in Windows...ship it'. IME, if it's an Intel or Broadcom chip, you're probably fine.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    > if it's an Intel or Broadcom chip, you're probably fine From rough memory, Intel has a bad rep with chipsets above 1GbE speed. I think the problems are with their 2.5 and 5 GbE chipsets (and not 10GbE?), but I don't run those personally so don't remember the exact specifics.
  - doctorpangloss 3y ago
    > if it's an Intel or Broadcom chip, you're probably fine. You'd think, but a good test is to punch into google "e1000e proxmox issues" or "i210 proxmox issues." You'll discover that in addition to i225 issues another commenter is talking about, the Intel NICs shipping on the USFF PCs also have catastrophic issues in Linux and Windows.
Jzush 3y ago
If you don't need a stupid amount of compute power you can find even cheaper alternatives. I bought a used Asus Chromebox CN60 for $21, put $20 of ram(16gigs) in it and a $20 256 gig ssd. All in, ~$61 minus shipping and I have a small home server running CasaOS. Same as the Zima Board, I have it running Home Assistant, PiHole, a MariaDB instance & an image hosting website for my wifes project. It happily hums away running on a Cloudflare Tunnel. It's excellent! I had to set up my Cloudflare Tunnel manually but it has since been added as an app to the app repository. https://github.com/IceWhaleTech/CasaOS-AppStore/issues/158 https://github.com/IceWhaleTech/CasaOS-AppStore/issues/158
- jcuenod 3y ago
  I'm doing pretty much the same thing with cloudflared on an Acer cxi2 (Ubuntu server). I just use an external enclosure with on old SSD I had and it cost me about $20 with 4gb of RAM.
dheera 3y ago
I find NUCs kind of just work for home servers, consume a very reasonable amount of power (10W idle, 90W at full load, ~15-20W average in my case), aesthetically very neutral, and run standard Ubuntu distros with zero hardware driver issues. Everything works out of the box with a vanilla install. They're also available dirt cheap second-hand if you're okay with a generation or two older processor, and you can use an m.2 SSD inside the case without a dangling hard drive like I see with TFA's Zimaboard setups.
aequitas 3y ago
I have the Gen8 microserver from your second link and what I really like about it (besides the 4 bays) is that is has ILO. Whenever there is a boot issue or I need to reinstall I don't have to drag it out of my server closet onto my desk, find a monitor and keyboard to hook it up to (now that I think about it, I don't even have a VGA monitor anymore) just do basic BIOS or GRUB stuff. It can all be handled via the web interface and the HTML5 terminal works great. Biggest downside of this machine is the power draw, even at idle. I couldn't find anything in the Zimaboard docs about it, but my guess is I'd have to find a mini displayport compatible monitor if I ever need to do disaster recovery of the OS. This especially becomes an issue with the eMMC, as you cannot swap it out easily like an SD on a raspberry pi.
- lproven 3y ago
  Huh. I have one and found the iLO such a total PITA to try to make the thing boot from its primary disk, a small SSD, that I ended up turning it totally off. I guess now I need to find a way to turn it back on again...
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Yeah, it's useful once you've typed in an "iLO Advanced" (or similar name) license key to enable it. Findable online for free with any search engine. ;)
    - lproven 3y ago
      I have never even thought of that... It's a home NAS. It has one user, me, and only 1 network cable. The faffing around with a console cable, separate from the network cable, and the inability to just point to a boot disk like an ordinary PC, were hugely irritating and drove me to shouting anger several times. It never occurred to me that I'd want the wretched thing, let alone try to unlock more of it. All I want is to say BOOT OFF THIS DRIVE without defining volumes or single-member arrays or any of that enterprise BS.
      - 3y ago

hddherman 3y ago

Author here. Yes, you can get a better deal if you don't care about the noise, but I value silence higher than having the best performance per dollar.

justinclift 3y ago
Yeah, that's fair. The first option there (HP ProDesk 600 G4 Mini) do seem to have a reputation for being noisy, though replacing the fan with something quieter (eg Noctua) seems to be what people do: https://www.reddit.com/r/minilab/comments/zlowh2/hp_prodesk_600_g4_mini_reduce_fan_noise/ https://www.reddit.com/r/minilab/comments/zlowh2/hp_prodesk_...
Semaphor 3y ago
See my comment here [0], passively cooled thin clients exist. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37820458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37820458

densh 3y ago

While comparing server prices it’s useful add 3-4 years of electricity cost of running it mostly idle 24/7. In europe new small power efficient SoC boards often win in such comparison over used socketed systems.

linsomniac 3y ago

I have a couple of Dell versions similar to your first link, the Micro form factor. They are nice and compact, but they have heat issues. I have one running BlueIris security camera software and have to run it with the case off and an extra fan to keep it from going into thermal overload. The next step larger systems are probably a better bet.

justinclift 3y ago
Thanks, didn't know that. Will need to keep an eye out for problems. :)

alias_neo 3y ago

We don't all live in countries where electricity is near-free. In the UK, it would cost more in electricity than the $200 Zimaboard to run one of those eBay machines for a single year. e.g. 90W 24/7 for a year is ~£212 (~$258 US), 60W 24/7: ~£142 ($173 US) In this price range, power-consumption is a _major_ decision factor.

Mistletoe 3y ago
The HP Prodesk is 12W idle though. I think the Zimaboard is 8w idle. I agree that power consumption is a big cost that people don’t think about though.
zekica 3y ago
90W is peak power consumption for these. They idle at about 8-9W measured at the wall socket or $22-25/year.
- alias_neo 3y ago
  That's why I included a 60W cost too. What's the point running hardware 24/7/365 is it's idle?
  - MisterTea 3y ago
    So you can connect on demand? My server is mostly idle too as it only serves me.
  - sjsdaiuasgdia 3y ago
    Instant availability of the services provided without waiting on bootup, wakeup, or anything else.
  - firecall 3y ago
    Because home servers tend to be bursty on demand workloads. If you doing something that is hammering a CPU at 100% 24/7, then you’d get a faster CPI to get the workload completed faster and you’d be back to having idle CPU cycles… Now RAM on the other hand! Free RAM is wasted RAM!

bluGill 3y ago

This is passively cooled. Fans are likely to be the first thing to fail on a setup like this. Plus it is likely you are running 24x7, and so fans means dust gets inside and eventually will kill things.

Semaphor 3y ago
I got a refurbished J4105 8GB RAM thin client for 40€, 2 m.2 SSD slots (though one required an adapter, and only that one is NVMe, so lets add another $15 for the adapter), passively cooled. The case doesn’t look as nice, but still over 100€ difference for a slightly faster, slightly newer CPU. And while not officially, it does support 16 GB RAM if I ever decide to upgrade. It does not have GBe ports, so that is probably the biggest reason to go with this board instead, besides wanting the sleek case. edit: It’s the Futro S740

MisterTea 3y ago

The Lenovo Thinkcentre M720Q and M920Q have both an m.2 M key and an internal PCIe x8 slot you can stuff a GPU, quad gigabit or dual 10GbE into. No ECC though. Sells for about $100 on eBay for a decent one with PSU that is the same PSU as their laptops (Bonus if you're a Thinkpad user). You need a riser and rear bracket for the PCIe slot that can be found on eBay for like $25. I have a 6 core i5, 32GB RAM, a dual Intel 10Gb adapter and 2TB NVMe in mine. Idles at 19W which is 2W less than the rectangular trash can 10Gb Verizon router's 21W. Total build cost was around $200 for all used hardware.

nirav72 3y ago
The lenovo m720q is amazing little machines. I’m using it with a 2 x 2.5 gbps QNap nic and running OpnSense. It’s been almost a year and it has been rock solid as a router. Before I discovered the m720q , I had no idea that a 8 lane PCie slot was possible in a mini-pc that small.
vladvasiliu 3y ago
I have a 4x1Gb i350 in my SFF EliteDesk and it can get quite warm. I've had to install an aftermarket small fan for peace of mind, since the case only has a CPU and a PSU fan which don't create any airflow over the extension cards. How's a dual 10 GbE faring in the even smaller enclosure of those Lenovos? What's the noise situation? I wanted to switch my router and random home VM needs to an EliteDesk mini I have lying around but it only has a Gb port, so I was looking at thunderbolt 10 GbE adapters, but seeing how pricy they are, might as well get a new complete box.
- MisterTea 3y ago
  I've yet to really beat on it but it's quiet for its size with a typical laptop like fan sound under load. The dual port 10Gb intel nic doesn't seem to add much heat though I purposefully went with an SFP card in order to use cooler running fiber SFP's (A copper SFP runs burning hot vs a warm fiber SFP). A brand new dual port 10Gb SFP card costs like $100 USD. Used is far less. I also wound up realizing that when it comes to 10Gb, copper can be more costly than fiber and uses more power per port. So I only buy SFP+ gear so I can use one of many interfaces: copper, fiber, DAC, etc. Fiber and DAC cables are cheaper and use less power. I have a ~$250 USD 8 port Mikrotik 10Gb SFP+ switch and also bought a few cheap 10Gb mellanox SFP cards for my server, desktop and work bench PC for like $30 each off ebay (I use them in Linux and FreeBSD.)

aborsy 3y ago

You can’t compare used products with brand new ones. You should compare with a used zimaboard market price.

justinclift 3y ago
Ebay doesn't list any used Zimaboards when I checked just now. :/
0x457 3y ago
Yeah, you can when we're talking about home servers.

doctorpangloss 3y ago

These machines and the ZimaBoard absolute bottom of the barrel cheapo NICs, which are the biggest source of issues for networking devices. In my experience using all of these, if you want to have reliable networking, either use a Linux distribution that ships with the quirks needed for specifically consumer NIC hardware (like VyOS), or use a NIC that ships for the OCP platform (aka commodity hyperscaler NICs) like the i350.

kjs3 3y ago
Yeah...this really bites the folks that don't do a lot of networking and expect things to 'just work'. The forums are filled with threads that start with 'I have this weird bug/failure I can't debug...' that peter out with 'I replaced the NIC with a good one and problem went away'. Those crappy (looking at you, Realtek) NICs have all sorts of bizarre issues that the vendors clearly don't care about beyond 'works in Windows...ship it'. IME, if it's an Intel or Broadcom chip, you're probably fine.
- justinclift 3y ago
  > if it's an Intel or Broadcom chip, you're probably fine From rough memory, Intel has a bad rep with chipsets above 1GbE speed. I think the problems are with their 2.5 and 5 GbE chipsets (and not 10GbE?), but I don't run those personally so don't remember the exact specifics.
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
  > if it's an Intel or Broadcom chip, you're probably fine. You'd think, but a good test is to punch into google "e1000e proxmox issues" or "i210 proxmox issues." You'll discover that in addition to i225 issues another commenter is talking about, the Intel NICs shipping on the USFF PCs also have catastrophic issues in Linux and Windows.

Jzush 3y ago

If you don't need a stupid amount of compute power you can find even cheaper alternatives. I bought a used Asus Chromebox CN60 for $21, put $20 of ram(16gigs) in it and a $20 256 gig ssd. All in, ~$61 minus shipping and I have a small home server running CasaOS. Same as the Zima Board, I have it running Home Assistant, PiHole, a MariaDB instance & an image hosting website for my wifes project. It happily hums away running on a Cloudflare Tunnel. It's excellent! I had to set up my Cloudflare Tunnel manually but it has since been added as an app to the app repository. https://github.com/IceWhaleTech/CasaOS-AppStore/issues/158 https://github.com/IceWhaleTech/CasaOS-AppStore/issues/158

jcuenod 3y ago
I'm doing pretty much the same thing with cloudflared on an Acer cxi2 (Ubuntu server). I just use an external enclosure with on old SSD I had and it cost me about $20 with 4gb of RAM.

dheera 3y ago

I find NUCs kind of just work for home servers, consume a very reasonable amount of power (10W idle, 90W at full load, ~15-20W average in my case), aesthetically very neutral, and run standard Ubuntu distros with zero hardware driver issues. Everything works out of the box with a vanilla install. They're also available dirt cheap second-hand if you're okay with a generation or two older processor, and you can use an m.2 SSD inside the case without a dangling hard drive like I see with TFA's Zimaboard setups.

aequitas 3y ago

I have the Gen8 microserver from your second link and what I really like about it (besides the 4 bays) is that is has ILO. Whenever there is a boot issue or I need to reinstall I don't have to drag it out of my server closet onto my desk, find a monitor and keyboard to hook it up to (now that I think about it, I don't even have a VGA monitor anymore) just do basic BIOS or GRUB stuff. It can all be handled via the web interface and the HTML5 terminal works great. Biggest downside of this machine is the power draw, even at idle. I couldn't find anything in the Zimaboard docs about it, but my guess is I'd have to find a mini displayport compatible monitor if I ever need to do disaster recovery of the OS. This especially becomes an issue with the eMMC, as you cannot swap it out easily like an SD on a raspberry pi.

lproven 3y ago
Huh. I have one and found the iLO such a total PITA to try to make the thing boot from its primary disk, a small SSD, that I ended up turning it totally off. I guess now I need to find a way to turn it back on again...
- justinclift 3y ago
  Yeah, it's useful once you've typed in an "iLO Advanced" (or similar name) license key to enable it. Findable online for free with any search engine. ;)
  - lproven 3y ago
    I have never even thought of that... It's a home NAS. It has one user, me, and only 1 network cable. The faffing around with a console cable, separate from the network cable, and the inability to just point to a boot disk like an ordinary PC, were hugely irritating and drove me to shouting anger several times. It never occurred to me that I'd want the wretched thing, let alone try to unlock more of it. All I want is to say BOOT OFF THIS DRIVE without defining volumes or single-member arrays or any of that enterprise BS.
    - 3y ago