Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

Zima is average-good at branding and maybe styling and that's about it. The hardware is pretty much random ODM low power designs, but based on ancient 2016 era releases.

Maybe it's just a company in Hong Kong trying to offload old inventory, maybe it's something else (i.e. Intel SIPP), but I wouldn't recommend it either way, unless power is free and you really want to minimally reduce e-waste (which is what this is).

You can get practically any later generation for the same (or lower) price with the same (or better) features but higher performance. Even a 5W design from Qotom from the same era would be a better choice.

An example: an ODM has a X30G-N5100 which is a 4-core 4-threads based Intel SoC from 2021 with (LP)DDR4 support burst to 2.8Ghz and a TDP of 6W. Normally you'd not have them burn full power all the time and you're more likely to use 3 to 4W. It has modern features, modern security and mainstream support for all of it. And if that's too new for you, you can get a J4xxx or N4xxx series box for half the price of that zima, but double the performance.

But the selling point of this board is IO not CPU: 2X SATA, ePCIe and 2X NIC. You can run proxmox on it with TrueNAS in RAID1 and pfsense/opnsense in a vm.

Isn't putting TrueNas in a VM a big no-no?

Pass the underlying disk or HBA to be fully owned by the TrueNAS VM and you will be a-okay.

It's not like that is a unique set of IO features, even for the SoC that is used it is somewhat sparse. Granted, bolting on more IO on such a low-end chip would have limited use, but SATA and PCIe have been rather common on small single board computers for over a decade.

As for what software you can run: you can do that on any PC, that has nothing to do with this board.

The processor is weak comparatively on the Zima. I think the minimum you want to be looking at is the current generation of Intel N-series. CWWK and Topton make nice options that have similar I/O, better networking. STH [0] has a good article reviewing.

[0] https://www.servethehome.com/almost-a-decade-in-the-making-o...

> But the selling point of this board is IO not CPU

> the processor is weak comparatively on the Zima

…

Wouldn't you rather have a decent CPU and better I/O at the same price point in a similar form factor?

There are options. Some that are better, which is why I posted the link. Not everyone is OK with a couple generations old CPU.

> Wouldn't you rather have a decent CPU and better I/O at the same price point in a similar form factor?

Zima's site showcase benchmarks that position their boards at the same performance level of a Raspberry Pi 4.

The recently announced Raspberry Pi 5 doubles that, improves all IO, and costs between half and a third of an equivalent Zimaboard.

For the price of a Zimaboard, we can drop by Amazon and buy a MiniPC from the likes of Beelink or Minisforum.

It does have a PCI-e slot, which is unusual in competing products. But yeah, otherwise it's a matter of marketing particularly with the Zimaboard. Their new Zimablade is much more interesting; it's still old slow tech but they retained the PCI-e slot and dropped the price all the way down to $65 US.

The recently released RPI 5 offers PCIe connectivity I believe.

It does, but it uses an unusual cable. There are tons of SBCs with PCI-e M.2 slots too. The neat thing about the two Zimas is they have a standard PCI-e slot.

I doubt the ODMs are incentivized to wrap up some e-waste, rebrand it, and introduce it to the market under a new cap like ZimaBoard. Is this common practice?

This is very common. It's mostly due to the long-life programs where a large surplus or older SoCs are available. It's also why there is a large amount of C3000 based hardware suddenly.

Care to explain what an ODM is for this of us unfamiliar with the term? I'm not finding any particularly clarifying search results from the terms you used, AFAICT it's just a very broad term for manufacturers of industrial controller boards, embedded "Box PCs," etc. and doesn't refer to any specific product category? The "box PCs" would be most analogous to this product, but the problem with those is as a rule they do not sell direct to consumer, and even if you do manage to find someone willing to sell you one they come with a generous B2B markup. But maybe you're talking about something else.

I think ODM in this context is Original Design Manufacturer. From Wikipedia...

> An original design manufacturer is a company that designs and manufactures a product that is eventually rebranded by another firm for sale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_design_manufacturer

Right- a broad category of companies. So what is an ODM device?

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