When I got this I was blown away from the initial packaging to just the size and feel of it! It's got multiple ports shown in my pictures, but what really sets it apart is the PCIe slot. It's an open ended 4x slot thats a 2.0 slot. This is unique and greatly opens up the possibilities of what you can connect to it right out of the box! From wireless to graphics cards to hard drives, the expansion cards that fit there are endless! It's also got a SATA power port which is nice for easy hard drive connection. Mini display port was an odd choice but it works well with an adapter.

Now onto how well it operates. The pre installed OS isn't bad, but it is still in it's infancy. I played around with it a bit and docker installs are easy, and it works fine overall. For my uses I wanted something different and found installing a new OS pretty easy. From a performance perspective, it's a little slow for full windows VMs, but works great with headless OSes and smaller applications. I could see it work well as a router/firewall, home automation server, media server, or home lab.

Definitely a great gift for a tinkerer or someone into techie things!

This is a nice single board computer in a small fanless heatsink case. It doesn't get even warm to the touch when operating, very low power. I spent some time with the CasaOS that came pre-installed. Its got some promise, but in my opinion not quite ready for my application. I've been using Open Media Vault for several years on a much older nettop computer with excellent results so I installed it instead. OMV 6.0 installed in minutes with no hiccups at all. This is not to say that CasaOS won't be a good choice in the long run, it's, its got good potential, but its still a 0.3 release. OMV has full docker support available so it can run most of the applications that make up CasaOS, but docker isn't required for the core functions.

The ZimaBoard hardware is really nice. You could get one of the low powered micro NUC like packages with a Celeron processor in the same price range and have more CPU horsepower, but it will be missing the PCIe slot, the second GbE port, and probably one or both SATA ports. If you look at Raspberry Pi you end up needing a case, plus multiple shield cards to get the GbE and other basic ports. The ZimaBoard doesn't need any other cards for most applications. It loads software very easily, you just need to know to use F2 on boot to get into the BIOS to boot from a USB installation stick.

I'm still assembling my server. I'm planning on two 5 TB 2.5" USB portable disks for the primary file storage, and another pair of 3.5" large disks for backup and media files. I'll use an external power supply for the 3.5" disks along with the SATA interfaces. I like to use the USB disks for general file storage, (along with NTFS file system) so I can just unplug them and move to a PC to recover or copy data if there's an issue with the server hardware (I've never had to do this though). I'm not planning on using the PCIe slot, although it might useful in the future. If you wanted an all SATA server it would be cool to use for a multiple port SATA I/O card. I wish they offered a bracket of some sort to physically mount the ZimaBoard plus mount for the PCIe card. I could make this, but it would be much cleaner and professional to have a manufactured solution.

The ZimaBoard has some real advantages over alternative platforms for either file servers or firewall use:
1. Dual GbE ports onboard.
2. Intel platform with good compatibility with any Linux based OS
3. Dual SATA onboard
4. PCIe
5. Very low power

Things to consider:
1. The CPU is a pretty old generation, although more than powerful enough for router or file server duty
2. While nicely packaged, the PCIe slot needs some fussy mechanicals if you want a securely mounted card
3. The SATA ports have only one power connector, and doesn't support enough power for 3.5" disks
4. Not enough horsepower to run Windows, especially server.

If you don't mind a bit of tinkering this is a great way to put together a NAS or gateway router, really not much more work than an off the shelf NAS box, but much less expensive.

When I heard about the development of the ZimaBoard I was impressed it would be one of the few SBCs with a PCIe slot and two SATA ports which is quite rare and that combo makes this a great value for a small footprint NAS. Hardware wise while the Celeron N3450 may seem dated compared to Mini PCs with newer N5095, having two SATA ports and a PCIe slot to run a NVMe SSD or a 4-port network card provides a very flexible platform. The benefits of being able to customize the ZimaBoard to your requirements offset the slower CPU.
CasaOS is very user friendly for adding extra functions from smart home support to various other applications so the ZimaBoard is perfect hub solution.
While there are many who compare this to the Raspberry Pi, this lacks GPIO and server wise this is more on par with an Odroid. Design wise the case is the heatsink which makes it look nicer than SBCs with plastic cases. The use of a mini displayport is a strange choice, while its rare you may need to connect this to a monitor it’ll be an extra cable or adapter you’d need.
Overall the extra expansion features make this a great platform may it be for a NAS or adding home automation hub support, a very unique SBC that delivers impressive performance.

This is basically a mini PC design for a headless server role. And uses x86 architecture incomes ready out of the box for virtualization. While you can use it as a regular mini PC it’s definitely suited more for a server role and there’s many things you can do with this. It’s powered with a four core low power Celoron which is quite capable to perform networking tasks. It has two built-in gigabit ethernet adapters. Say to a four-lane PCI connector and two USB‘s.

I thought I was going to build a online cloud storage because iOS still works better with cloud storage apps then direct attached storage. That was quite easy out of the box but when I saw everything else this thing was capable of I decided to experiment and play around with it a little bit. for its size it is quite powerful and faster than I expected. You get plenty of virtualization options as well.

I find that openWRT isn’t really necessary as the router companies have really upped their game in terms of their own software as of late. But the streaming options are very interesting so I’m going to start experimenting setting up a media server and see how that compares. And maybe get another one and keep my cloud storage. I’m not sure if I can do iSCSI yet so I’m gonna experiment with that a little bit.

Besides the networking capabilities I think the big selling point on this is the actual four-lane PC i.e. slot that comes off of the side of the little box. The box is mostly heatsink by the way, and then you can use the PCI cards to expand the capabilities. I suppose, including a multi lane riser.

If you’re looking for a time on the headless server that gives you a little more expandability than a raspberry pi or mini-pc, this could be what you’re looking for. I don’t think this will replace the aforementioned devices as they will always have their place but this definitely opens up more options. I love the built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity of my raspberry pies and this will add some serious power to my network.

I never even heard of these until I saw them on Amazon. I’m not sure why they named it after an alcoholic Fresca drink but I’m certainly glad that I took this plunge.

This is the perfect board for your hobbyist or tinkerer. I grabbed this because #SingleBoardServer line caught my interest. The unit is built really well and feels great. I/O is a bit lacking to user as a mini desktop PC but as a headless server its excellent. I/O wise you get 1x Mini display port, 2X USB 3, 2X Gigabit Ethernet, 2X SATA 6GB's, 1X SATA power connector (more on that later),1X 4x PCI-E 2.0 ( connector is open ended and can accept larger cards), and a DC barrel jack for power. Th unit comes with CASA OS and is quite literally ready to go out of the box, create a login and your good to go and ready to start download docker apps from the app store. For my needs I wanted a mini Proxmox server and boy this thing works great. I'm able to run VM from DOS to Windows 11 with little to no issues. Is it fast? No, but its perfect for messing around in a home lab environment. The only gripes I have with the unit is if you use the PCI-E slot and keep the backing plate on the card it will block the mini DisplayPort port so you may need to remove the backing plate on some of your cards if you plan to have it hooked up to a display. As for the SATA issue it comes with an adapter for a single SATA drive, while it has 2 ports you will need to order the adapter on their site. Taking the unit apart reveals you can also internally wire this directly to a 12V DC source. The uses for this machine are endless, you can use it as a docker host, a NAS, a router / firewall, a VM machine, or you can use it as a mini desktop if needed. Something else that's excellent with this machine is the openness of the BIOS their are tons of additional options that you can play with. So if you have a tinkerer or a hacker in your life this is a great idea :)