I haven't had the zimacube pro long enough to give a comprehensive review, but I have had cause to deal with IceWhale through their rep Eva, and it has been a pleasure to deal with a company that is actually responsive to their customers. In short the hardware is great, but the people are better. Wishing them every success.

I had a few old servers that I had been using, specifically a Dell R410, a Dell R610, and a custom tower server. I was running Truenas, Proxmox, and Ubuntu server on the machines respectively. I was looking for an all-in-one replacement for these machines. ZimaCube to the rescue! I wanted to push this hardware to the max. I have installed Proxmox, I virtualized Truenas, and I even virtualized my Physical Ubuntu Server.

The ZimaCube just works. It is a fantastic and powerful device in an elegant formfactor. I am using it for everything from a Plex Media Server, Storage Server, local DNS server, self-hosted applications, and so much more.

I am very happy with the product. Ice Whale did a fantastic job with this product launch all the way around.

The hardware seems to be perfect but the software and tutorial support for cross-platform applications, especially with Windows, is still very bad. I often miss essential detailed information. When I bought the Creator Pack I did it because I read somewhere in the campaign that the ZimaCube with this strong GeForce graphic card RTX A2000 Ada can be also used for daily work under Windows 10/11 (which is a big part of my work, especially Adobe programs like Photoshop or Indesign) and as a data server, private cloud or plex server during the rest of the time. Unfortunately, I found 0 explanation of how to install Windows on the internal onboard SSD (without losing the ZimaOS), which is big enough for that (1TB in the case of the Creator Pack) and can be theoretically partitioned and used with a boot manager for different OSs. I'm a Linux absolute newbie and have difficulty finding specific information for many, many details (regarding ZimaCube and before that ZimaBoard which was my first buy and try into this new world), despite all the forums, channels, and community support, which is good as an idea but very intransparent and a bit too scattered. On the other hand, I see a lot of potential and opportunities and I'm ready to learn but I need more detailed explanations for Linux newbies. Keep the good work and I hope you will catch up with this part.

I ordered a ZimaCube Pro Creator Pack.

The ZimaCube Pro is a great product, specs and performance are very interresting for those who want a NAS but with more advanced features and performances.

The RTX A2000 Ada of creator pack is a very capable GPU for hardware transcoding and IA model.
I use it with Plex and Ollama and both are very reactive.

I tried ZimaOS but I don’t use it anymore.
I was planning to use another OS when I buyed the ZimaCube.
ZimaOS is a good start for beginer but the lack of advanced features is very limiting.
For exemple: no option to create NFS/CIFS/SMB shares or to do ISCSI sharing.
ZimaOS can run some VM but in basic way, and no backup tool for these VM.
It can run docker container but with minimalist configuration settings.
We don’t have a true backup system to create some snapshot of data stored on the NAS and export it to another NAS or external cloud provider for exemple.
I see some people lost their data and asking for solution on Icewhale forum / discord so the RAID function is not stable to keep your data without a backup plan.

I installed a Proxmox OS on it and joined it on my Proxmox cluster.
On this proxmox, I run two VM:
1) An ubuntu VM with docker and Portainer.
I use it for my containers like Plex and Ollama.
With Proxmox: I can make a GPU passthrough to this VM and use the RTX A2000 Ada.

2) The second VM is a Truenas Scale instance that have a direct access to ZimaCube’s disk.
I installed 6 2,5inch Sata SSD (2 To / disk) and direct attached these disk to the Truenas VM.
I use it with ZFS and everything work great.

I also use 4 NVME drives of 4To on the 7th bay and direct pass it to Trunas VM.
I have an issue with the 7th bay: I cannot create a ZFS raid on the nvme drive with truenas. I have no idea of what is going here, It seems that de 4 nvme to U2 adaptator just don’t support it.

The 10Gb network ports are very usefull for me as my lab network is supporting this speed.
As I mentioned earlier: I wanted to use this NAS to make NFS or ISCSI sharing, I use it to store VM disk or backup from my proxmox cluster.
The 10Gb network port are very usefull to do this with my Truenas VM running on ZimaCube.

The overall build quality is good but not perfect…
The CPU fan is noisy and don’t cool so well, the CPU get very high on temperature and the fan can get very noisy when spinning at high speed.
Icewhale said that they are working on a solution (a new CPU fan system) and should send them free to replace the current system. Wait and see… Or I will change the cooling system by myself in few weeks.

To resume: ZimaCube is a great device, I love it but it’s because I have enough knowledge on computer system to correct all of it’s default by myself.
The hardware and performance are great, at least for the ZimaCube Pro.
It’s not a perfect device but it’s a great first try on NAS devices for IceWhale.
It’s more complicated that the others product created by Icewhale before and they need time to learn and improve therself.
I have 4 ZimaBlade and the diffrence between these devices are huge.
I can’t wait to see the next iteration of ZimaCube or next devices projet from IceWhale, I’m sure that it will be better and better.

Do not hesitate to contact me to discuss in a more technical manner about expectations and possible improvements.