It's funny that Wendell's channel is called Level 1 Techs because he's literally the level 2 tech for every single popular tech KZfaqr.

It seems like we're entering a new era of Homelab-related hardware-in the past nobody made *anything* that was specifically geared towards homelab use (or SMB that just needs something modest). Now we have 45Homelab's HL15 and the ZimaCube at the more 'priced at a premium' end, then wacky things like Minisforum's new MS-01 on the 'decent value networking-focused' side... I think we're in the 'gen 1 era' right now (which explains some of the weird quirks like you mention in this video), and I hope in a 2nd gen pass, we'll see some devices that hit their targets on value + performance a little better.

This is one of the best tech reviews I've seen anywhere. The explanation of the PCIe issues here was top notch and easily understandable and was actually a great explanation of PCIe in general. If someone were to ask me about how PCIe works I might just point them here. This was also a very informative and honest review of the product. I think people will be able to understand if this product will fit their use case from the information here. Nice!

Wendell is an amazing guy. I don't know when he sleeps. I think he's powered by zfs.

Speaking as a backer, this is such an incredible bummer. Thank you so much for posting this through review

You are always fair and honest. Thanks.

The N100/N95 is more suited to a bare metal appliance application rather than a nas or especially a server imo. For a device like this it really seems like something more along the lines of a Ryzen 5700U would make more sense with 12 pcie lanes and 64gb of ram. It's also configurable to 10W TDP but can go much higher if desired. In retail prices this would add like.... $100? Seems worthwhile.

eDP is not a connector, its merely a protocol. the name of this connector is micro coax, I-PEX being the largest manufacturer of this connector in the world. Its used in high bandwidth applications like displays, cameras and like you've shown here, PCIe which is a totally valid application. depending on the model of the connector, they are designed to operate at over 20Gbps.

It was quite helpful, I never thought of how much work goes into making such videos, please keep doing such great work 😊

The Zima Cube has a lot of internal features that I would find on an OEM computer.

Your PCIe journey is familiar to me and I pay much more attention to this now. Knowing how the system is configured is really important when you are looking at high performance devices (at the consumer level) and it seems these companies in China take a lot of shortcuts. I recently ran into an issue with my MSI Z790 motherboard with 6 SATA ports and eventually found that only 5 of them were actually directly connected to the PCH (which supports 8). The sixth port (probably due to the lack of space for the traces) was connected via an asmedia chip and I only noticed the performance difference because I was using SSDs.

the technical explanation was great, so clear and precise. thanks for making these top quality videos!

*grabs popcorn*

I actually appreciate you not re-filming this. It seems like it was a bit of a disaster and the update lets us know how much of one it was. I like the general concept but the execution leaves a good bit to be desired. Thank you!

Videos like this are important for people to see. This “looks” great but until information is accurate from them I wouldn’t touch it.

The in-depth technical review of this is really great! Most reviews are just going to focus on ports and features, not the actual lanes and bandwidth availability like you did. Thank you!

Lines up with my initial knee-jerk reaction when first seeing this kickstarter - "That's a nice case, but there's no way the N100 can drive that kind of expandability". I didn't look any further (my DIY NAS is far more capable than this anyway), but it's good to see this looked into nonetheless. I'm honestly surprised that they're actually using PCIe switches, given that these tend to be pricey, but I guess that's why they're using very low lane count versions that ultimately render the "expandability" of this useless. This to me is the Achilles' heel of all this new SFF NAS/homelab stuff - it's based on mobile hardware with too few PCIe lanes to serve what such a build needs, with networking, NVMe, maybe a HBA, maybe a GPU, etc. It just doesn't have what it takes to run what it claims to run.

Thanks for the great overview of the hardware and your journey! Greatly appreciate how open you are about this experience.

Colten, for someone who doesn't claim to be a hardware expert, you do a great job of assessing hardware issues. Another great video, sir!

Excellent coverage of the product and the technical problems that you found. Thank you for this.

Thank you for the honest review. Not having enough PCIe lanes from the N100 is DEFINITELY going to be a problem, along with the disjointed and varied sources of information, which they are responsible for publishing.

Great video Colten!

Großartig. Was watching the Zimacube with mild curiosity, but sceptical about all the media hype.

I just discovered this channel, and what a breath of fresh air it is! I love how calm and well-informed you are, this was a great video. I'm looking forward to future videos :)

It is amazing to see how you incredibly improved your channel - great job!

Great to have a fully rounded review! In my opinion a jonsbo n3 case with a motherboard cpu combo which suiting your needs is the way to go if you want this kind of form factor. An other aspect which may need some investigation is the super high idle power consumption. To me it seems the cpu is not able to enter low power c states. Also not shutting down hard drives. Seriously seeing better idle power with my nas with a 9th gen i3 in it.

I found this channel about a week ago and.. WOW. Great job!

Thanks for delving deep into this from the homelabber/techie point of view. The Zima Cube has a lot of promise and is a great form factor, but too much has been in flux to keep track of what is what and what the final version will actually have.

This looks cool but I’d only be interested in buying the bare case. BYO motherboard, etc.

There were some not clear things I initially felt about that thing, but not clearly understood deeply. Now I have learned the key lessons: always search and wait before purchasing polished things... Thank you very much!

The N100 gets misused a lot, Intel clearly didn't want anyone to build anything with lots of IO with it. Would be cool to see some EPYC Embedded devices.

Thank you so much for the time and sweat you have invested into this !!!

I was really hoping this would be better. Thanks for the in depth review.

Thanks for you time and infos about the ZC

Very good video. Thank you for sharing all the information on this product. Your review was very insightful.

Wendell is that king of these things :D

Thank you for the best review of this device so far. I'm happy you have clearly laid out the pro's and con's better than anyone else. I am subscribed.

Fair call, Fair video, Im going to wait for vers 4 or 5

This is one of the reasons I went with the pro model because the n100 is not well suited for this application. The power draw seems excessive though.

After they fix the motherboard, I love the physical design of that NAS. Good investigation btw. You wonder how these things get released when it wouldn't even pass testing vs it's own data points.

For me my interest lays in the pro model, thanks for this video it shows me the answers to the questions i had

My favourite HH. I've been a long time tech enthusiast with no access to enthusiast grade tech and been feeding on scraps to learn and maybe one day make it to the IT field.

Their non communicative skills and basically scamming the cube with the lane details give me a very, very bad taste... Thanks for this video... This company is now on my 'watch carefully and probably not going to ever be getting stuff from them' list... Kickstarters working like this is sounding more like a scam.... Or just very badly managed project... Not to mention this is not a cheap system at all.. AMF I find the pricing of this thing to be quiet ludricous. Nice video.. This is very helpful and eye opening... ! Well presented good info!

Great work 👍 love all your videos.

These are the kind of videos the true homelab community needs!

Thanks for the review, I thought really hard about jumping on this in December, glad I let it pass by.

Thank you for the review. I think i should probably just DIY my own NAS using a consumer cpu and motherboard.

They should just offer the case as standalone. Without the Type C in the front. When I saw the thumbnail I thought it was just that but sadly no. I don't know I feel that an I3 would've been much better, instead of the N100.

Amazing work!

Cool Explanation dude !

Nice and good review. Keep up the good work :)

I was ready to put money into the Kickstarter as a replacement for my aging Gen8 microserver. However backed out as more and more questions came up. Feeling good about that choice. Even the update from company seems to almost make it worse.

What are you using to make the diagrams shown here?

Very Interesting, Thank You!

This makes me really happy I didn't back it and went a custom built route with consumer parts. Wish them the best, but this is obviously a gen 1 product.

I've been looking into building my own similar thing out of an old desktop. Originally, I was just gonna do it for price reasons. Now I think I might do it for utility too

I thik I'll stick to my plan of scrounged hardware in a NAS style case, thanks.

I have no idea why this is the very first time YT has recommended me your channel, but better late than never!

The specs being buried deep into the base product page is something that would make me avoid a product like the plague. I hope that they are a bit more up front about their specs in the future.

I have to say, it is a very nice looking case. I wish they sold it by itself.

Great video. I think you were more than fair with your criticism of the device. Just feels like they rushed this thing out the door. It's a great idea and I would definitely be interested in a V2

I would love to see a comparison with the base and the pro model in the new revitions

They designed the backplane connector like that on purpose to keep you locked in, given most of the off the shelf parts in there. Hopefully someone makes an adapter. Thats despicable

A great alternative might be the JONSBO N2, it just a chassis and a backplane, but offers an upgrade path and more compatibility with out all the constraints in the same form factor. not quite a 1:1 replacement, but still a valid option imo (Used the term backplane lightly since its really just a passthrough)

I am watching this kind of content and realized i still have a hdd in my laptop... I feel broke 😔😔

I'm looking at replacing an HP DL60 with this but this is still a prototype project and needs a few more years to develop fully. It has the potential to be very valuable for home use but needs time to get the software finished and debugged. I look forward to an updated review in the future when these issues have been resolved.

one of the greatest intros I have ever seen

Thanks for the video! I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on Ugreen's upcoming NAS products

A case that is a copy of this, but allows me to add my own internals, would be preferable

As soon as the part about PCIE switches and how the x16 slot is x2 at best and the x8 slot is x1 or some nonsense I crossed this off my wishlist. I was super excited at the beginning though, but I didn't notice the name of the video...

I was a backer and enthusiast but I canceled my kickstarter at the last minute. The real world power consumption was a deal breaker. I’m so glad you discovered the PCI limits. That’s concerning.

What do you use to prepare the diagrams?

what would make this thing so much cooler as a concept, is the 10g port getting a 3.0x1 link, and taking the rest of those 8 lanes of 3.0, and turning them into 16 lanes of 2.0 Imagine a wider desktop chassis with 12-16x3.5 inch drives on 2 SAS controllers, and 6 NVMe. Sure the NVMe would be comparatively slow, but realistically you're not getting a whole lot of speed out of the atom class anyway, even if you have the 8 core atom N305. IIRC my 10x16TB without caching, was almost exactly half way saturated on my 40G NIC(either slightly above or slightly below 20G) This could make better use of the additional PCIe lanes of the Pro model

Lol, i totally would run Windows on this 😅. Storage spaces is just so practical

Let's goooo zimacube HardwareHaven review 🎉

Excellent work. Got my sub! ;)

Just cause curious I put together a system within the $699 price bracket - EU prices. You could build a Ryzen 5600GT, 1TB NVMe, 2x16GB ECC, ASUS Hyper m.2 for 4x NVMe devices, and an ATX board with PCIe 4.0/3.0 across the board -- though you'll still be limited to those 20 lanes - with the x16 being 4.0, and depending on the motherboard you'll get 3.0 or 4.0 on the rest (B550 vs X570) - even if some of them might do a bit of PCIe trickery. Throw in a random case of your choice, and you'll end up below that $699 price. Sure, you won't get the pre-built, with a system basically being ready to just boot up. You will however get something quite a lot more powerful than an N100, and at those idle wattages shown.. you wouldn't get much higher, if at all, with that 5600GT - My own 5750G server idles at 30W. You'd also get the ability to expand on the system. If you squeezed out a bit more you could possibly go for a B650/Ryzen 7000 system, and you'd have some more future proofing, as well as PCIe 5.0/4.0.

Great detailed review. Thanks for that. I was hopeful for this product, but… too bad

Really thought this thing would be dope. Welp time to look at n100 mini pc and USB enclosures with separate compute box again...

Very through video!

To get full 10G u also may need to enable Jumbo Frames on your router/switch so you can have frames bigger then 1500 bytes

Hey. Thank you for another kool video. Id like to take advantage of the fact that we have quite nice community here so I hope you sir dont mind me asking about loosly related topic. What software you guys use for home surveillance? I’m having a hard time with QVM pro on my TS-464 NAS. I have a 4650G based computer that will eventualy land in Silverstone CS382 with pfsense or unraid (or both) and perhaps I should utilise that for home surveillance software rather than my qnap or synology nases.

Nap and symbology also does use pcie switch but not that much :p For them the point is to have disk throughput at same level as build-in network card, not above, because it’s not a server but a nas

Based on this video, I am SO glad I didn't back this product. I ended up building my own NAS (well, still building it) which outperforms the ZimaCube outright. Fantastic video.

Do you use NextCoud for files and storage

Thanks for pointing it out. So i'll keep looking forward for the Aoostar 6Bay witch should contain an Ryzen7000 series cpu wich should have enough lanes.

What Motherboard/CPU combo do you recommend ?

Kind of glad I kickstarted the pro version? Maybe? I will have to see the final result. Still I think there's too much in the box for just an N100. It's also interesting that in the N100 model the 6 SATA drives get 3 PCIe 3.0 lanes while in the 1235U version they only get 2. Some of the expandability features should have been scrapped to allow it to perform better at it's core functions.

I still don't understand this product. A cwwk n100 nas board (quad i226s, 5 sata, dual m.2, and a single pcie slot, ddr5), a johnsbo n3 case, and a sfx psu is a little bit cheaper last time i priced this. What do i get going this route?

21:46 What about staggered power for sata? Do they have it? I've seen new backplanes on taobao that has dip-switches to control the staggered, e.g. 200-500ms etc

they might be sharing a prototype to get feedback on what things need improvment or changed out all together using a display connection for pci e cards is certainly a need to be swapped for sure

I'm looking for a motherboard with N100 and 4x NVME, or a way to connect 4 NVME drives... Are there any?

I actually have a N100 motherboard in a DTX form factor. Comes with x4 and x2 open slots of pcie. The southbridge basically handly everything else with x3 lane (USBs, NICs, SATA and other IO). works great so far, the NIC is only 1gig realtek but I already have supplied it with a 10gig aquantia card on the x2 lane and for satam basically using a LSI cards with IT mode firmware on it, that basically gives me 8 sata ports there on x4 slot. using it as a NAS, yes its doable, but with nvme ssd, not really. I have instead use a standard SATA SSD plugged in directly from motherboard as a OS and Cache drive. There's a NVME slot on it for storage but ended up not using it since its pointless (not enough pcie lanes that can make sense of it).

It's a bit pricey, but probably fair for the amount of hardware you are getting, and the power draw isn't great. I'm looking for something small, 2 bays max, but with upgradable memory, low power, nvme slots, so for me 2x nvme, 2x 2.5" SSD, 2.5g nic. I just saw Ugreen have a Kickstarter NAS starting March. I won't touch Synology any more, they've lost it, home and lower end SMB don't have 2.5g nics, and it's 2024. I have an old Synology, Asustor and Buffalo Tera station, but I need to replace all this to get software updates. If you get a chance to review the Ugreen I'd love to see that. What's about a a mini PC running TrueNAS, I'm thinking that might work for me.

This BEGS for a proper PLX chip and lane design. The 9x Gen3 lanes are most likely way way more than sufficient bandwidth wise, it just needs to be shared better.

much like the 3d print space where companies send stuff out for review and what they're actually doing is getting creators to beta test it for them. You get a questionable product that's nowhere near the final version and they get free feedback. When they do get a final version they then send it out for review so it gets more media coverage.

Well... i do like the N100 SOCs and i'm running three in total, as a lightweight desktop, router/fw and backupserver. but the limited number of PCIE-lanes and limited RAM keeps me from choosing these as a platform for my main homeserver. For this i'm still using the ivy-bridge Xeon platform...

You did a great job with the PCIE topopgraphy ! too bad for the unit but nice review

It's a shame that IceWhale hasn't done a better job with communicating exact specs for both of the Cubes much more clearly with those who have been sent prototypes and review units. Frankly with the N100 chips only having 9 PCIe 3.0 lanes total looking at all the devices that the Cubes say they had in their specs screamed to me "PCIe splitter/bridge" chips which in my eyes is No Bueno. However, with that in mind I think it's also time for Intel or AMD to step up and provide a decent, relatively low cost, power efficient processor for Homelab or the SMB market use that has enough PCIe lanes and RAM capacity to be useful. A decade plus ago a decent i3 based box could mostly fill that role in a pinch and with the right board also support ECC RAM. Not so these days. The N series chips are great for lower power devices like a router, simple NAS box or basic desktop, but more than one of those at a time. And with only 16GB of RAM total the N100 isn't going to be running anything more than a basic VM ontop of it's host OS. Of course Intel will say if someone needs anything more than the basics for a Homelab or "server" they need to move up to something with a Xeon workstation or server class box. That moves you up to those markets where many people can't afford to go unless they buy off-lease or decommissioned used gear and many devices in that class of gear are not known for their power efficiency. However, both companies really don't want to do that because it would undercut the huge margins they get on the workstation & server class of CPUs. I faced this exact dilemma when I was scouting for devices for months in 2023 to replace an outdated, rather inefficient but workhorse server I had been using for years in my own Homelab. In the end I ended up going for a used Lenovo P520 workstation, adding a 10Gbit NIC and SAS 12G HBA along with a few things. The power usage is better than the old box (but still not great) and the performance is excellent with still more room to grow. It may not be as cute or as turnkey as the ZimaCube but I ended up spending about half as much for all the hardware (sans drives) as the base model ZimaCube for a machine that is much more capable in the long run.

Thanks, man. I think I just dodged a bullet - after being stung by the Storaxa KS, I was leaning towards a ZimaCube. I think I'll pass and go back to homebrew until something better hits the market that doesn't cost $$$$.