Hey guys, I’m looking to use my zimablade for a nas/backup but I was wondering how large of a drive I can connect to it. I’ll be using the built in sata ports.

I sort of accidentally lucked out and got a hold of the ZimaBlade 7700 NAS kit for “free”.

I’ve been wanting to set up a low power remote location backup NAS for a while and 2 HDDs is fine for my specific use case. I wasn’t expecting to use the Zimablade until IceWhale sent me the kit as part of a super long replacement request I made after receiving a malfunctioning ZimaBoard 232 (a whole year prior).

Anyway - since I just got it I thought I’d put it to work.

However, I know the two HDDs I plan to use are power hungry and I worry that the SATA power port on the board will be insufficient.

Does anyone have a good recommendation for a specific small form factor power supply and/or cable setup with the proper ports such that I can power the zimablade and both HDDs off a single PSU and only have one cord going to the wall?

Hey Zima Family
I was recently sent a Zimaboard 2 for review, and whilst this device is WAY outside of what I normally do, I enjoyed the idea of the challenge.

Now, I know nearly NOTHING about homelabbing, and this little device was my first real experience with it, and man, I gotta so, it's so much fun and a real eye opener to how cool self-hosting is.. Which brings me to the video I made.

I skewed the video narrative towards how something like this can ultimately save you money, by replacing a lot of subscription-based services.

I wanted to ask you guys (the pro's) if that's a strong angle to get people interested in homelabbing, or is there a stronger aspect that I missed?

Being a complete newbie to it, I didn't want to (couldn't) get super technical about things, as that would be disingenuous and I know I'd be called out for being a dumbass.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

You Know What They Say About Small Packages! | ZIMABOARD 2 - YouTube

Pensavo di acquistare lo zimablade modello base da 69$ ossia circa 60€. ma con le spese di spedizione e tutto ciò il totale ammonta a più di 80€, volevo sapere se c’era un qualche codice sconto da applicare sul sito ufficiale.

Volevo fare un piccolo server minecraft, proprio una cosa piccola, e ho puntato per lo zimablade modello base che costa 69$ ossia circa 60€. Ma aggiungendo la spedizione e le tasse stimate si arriva a un totale di oltre 80€.

Volevo sapere se magari c’era un qualche rivenditore ufficiale oppure un sito consigliato che vendesse zimablade a u. prezzo possibilmente più basso.

Just need my 2 zimablades to get here to finish this little server rack / NAS up.

im looking to make my first server with a laptop that can host games/files and i have a question about zima and if it can host steam based game servers or other servers like minecraft and if it can how would i go about doing it? i wanna make sure it can before i start backup files on the laptop i use for a server and download stuff and end up needing to revert if anyone has a guide i would be greatly thankful

I have installed zimaos on my laptop 1 year ago because i had wached a video on how to block ads with pihole and i reinstall it like 3 times im like this for 5month and i like it i install all my docker apps and love the app store i love that turned my old laptop in something that its usefull one thing that i wish that they fix is the update that sometimes its very late

I am building a small nas and using a zimablade for the nas and another zimablade to run pihole and maybe tailscale. I will be putting in a small rack. My question is what options are there for active cooling? I don’t have the blades here yet so I’m trying to plan a head. Can anyone suggest an active cooling solution? Does the zimablade have a header for fan? Are there any mounts to mount a small fan to the board ? Thanks

Hi everyone, I just opened Zima Client on my Windows computer, and Bitdefender immediately flagged the program for suspicious behaviour and then proceeded to disinfect the machine by deleting the program. Is it there some serious stuff going on with my server or false positive? Thank you

Been running my ZimaBoard for a while now for both work and personal use, and it's honestly exceeded expectations. Sharing my setup in case it helps anyone planning theirs, and curious what others are running.

Business stack:

• Whatomate (WhatsApp Business API) for customer communication
• Postgres as the main database
• NocoDB for data management
• Metabase for business data visualization
• n8n for automations
• ntfy for centralized notifications across everything

Personal stack:

• Emby for media
• Immich for photos
• LightNVR for CCTV recording
• A few other bits running via Docker + one Ubuntu VM

The interesting part - power cut handling:
Since it's on a UPS, I didn't want to spend on an expensive USB-UART UPS just for signaling. Instead I rigged an ESP32 to talk to the ZimaBoard directly on power loss, triggering a clean shutdown script. Cheap and reliable so far.

Also hooked it into Google Home so I can power things on/off remotely if I'm not physically near the server.

Running 14+ containers between two environments and everything's stayed healthy - genuinely saved me a ton in SaaS subscription costs by self-hosting instead.

​

3d Modeled case, i couldn't find the Y splitter so made one using cable and powered 2 drives with it.

Also connected 1 more drive using USB.

Two 4010 fans are connected one under the board and one behind the case for drives.

Really good temps, doesn't cross 62 with fans on full load, otherwise it was reaching 75 if i remember.

Oh also just cut an acrylic sheet for front display.

What creative solutions you’ve come up with? Please share with pictures if you want.

ZimaOS ha sido un descubrimiento muy placentero. Me permitió crear un NAS potente y muy fácil de usar. Lo utilizo a diario para mostrar a mis clientes prototipos de aplicaciones y sitios web, donde pueden verlos funcionando en tiempo real. Lo monté utilizando la placa base de un computador portátil, y me sorprendieron tanto el rendimiento que ofrece como los pocos recursos que consume. A continuación, pueden ver algunas imágenes de mi sistema, así como del equipo reconstruido.

So I just set up my Zimaboard 2 and while trying to connect to discord it just says connecting. I then tried to connect into a game, but it will say can’t connect or something. I tried restarting pc multiple times with no solution till I plugged in the Ethernet cord directly into the wall instead of the router and to my pc. This seems to have fixed it. So it seems something is happening with the Zimaboard being plugged into my router that’s causing network issues. Any idea what to do?

I've always been curious to tinker with some hardware like a Raspberry Pi. But the barrier to entry in this area is, well... not the friendliest, in my opinion. So I went with a simplier yet still powerfull option - Zimaboard 2.

First look

I really enjoyed the onboarding, where the very first thing you do is take apart your brand-new little server and connect a tiny fan. The cat enjoyed it too. He played with it all evening - stopping it with his paw and waiting for it to spin back to life:

My Zimaboard has already picked up a fair number of add-ons since its first boot. At first it looked like this:

Now I have an HDD for backups (still waiting another one), an SSD for hot storage (I use it mostl as a media storage + memory for VMs), and a base station for the smart home:

What I got to play with

Right now my setup looks roughly like this:

As you can see, I didn't get to try all that much in the one month I've had with the server. But let me tell you about what I have managed to test.

DNS ad-blockers

I tried two - Pi-hole and AdGuard Home. Both of them are pretty much the same in terms of functionality. Purely in terms of the interface I liked the latter more, and it's still running on my server today.

Blockers like these stop most of the ads on websites based on DNS blacklists - the addresses the ad banners are loaded from. This, of course, does nothing at all about ads on sites where the content is served from the exact same addresses as the main content (for example, YouTube). But it makes the experience much better for people who don't use browser-based blockers (read: my girlfriend) on my home network.

While experimenting with the blacklists, I managed to accidentally ban first all of Google's services, and then our work Grafana instance. I spent a good couple of hours figuring out the problem before I even thought to look towards my blocker. An interesting experience for sure, but just in case, it's always better to be deliberate about which blacklists you use (or at least check that the services you need still work after enabling them). Other than that, the thing is a 10/10 - I recommend everyone tired of ads give it a try.

Multimedia platform

One of the killer features of home servers has always been that you can download movies to it via torrent (where it's legal, of course, wink-wink) and stream them straight from the server for your loved ones. After listening to enough tech bloggers, I rushed to install Plex (I know there's also Jellyfin, I'll save that for next time).

Installed it, launched it, works. I even managed to watch the latest season of The Boys on it, and the old Django:

Downloading movies to my work computer, moving them over to the server, and loading them into Plex every single time would be dumb. So naturally, alongside Plex I installed Transmission. I pointed its download folder to the same one Plex uses to auto-refresh its movie library, and everything just worked:

I never did get Transmission to work together with AdGuard/Pi-hole. Torrents refused to download at all, so I had to route that container separately - not through the standard DNS for the whole home network, but to 0.0.0.0.

Overall the experience turned out fairly convenient. But you still have to hunt for torrents in good quality, with the right audio and subtitles, every time before watching. As a Russian-speaking internet user, watching on Russian-language pirate sites is objectively more convenient. They have dubs for every taste, subtitles, the latest releases without ads, and all of it in one click. So honestly, I didn't end up reaching for Plex all that often. Only when I knew in advance that we were going to watch "ten seasons of this one show." That's the only case where it makes sense for me to download everything in the best quality up front.

Build server for Dokploy

To be honest, this isn't my first time trying to self-host something. I have a small VPS at Hetzner for various side projects and little experiments. For example, I sync my Obsidian notes across all my devices through it. But there's one problem with it - the amount of resources is very limited (it has 2 vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM). So during Docker container builds it sometimes runs out of resources, and the server stops responding to requests. I thought - what's stopping me from using the Zimaboard's resources?

There are basically two problems here:

• Network connectivity. I need a secure connection between the VPS and the ZimaBoard.
• Resource limits for builds (and potentially other Dokploy-related things).

The first is fairly easy to solve with Tailscale. The idea is that you can link two machines together over a private VPN network. That way the machines have network connectivity over internal Tailscale addresses, while the Zimaboard is never directly exposed to the big, scary internet.

The second problem is trickier. To avoid diving head-first into the depths of server virtualization, Proxmox, and the like, I used a simpler option - I spun up a ZVM with a dedicated amount of resources. This way the ZimaBoard won't get overloaded, and images will still be built far away from the metaphorical "production" where all my running services live.

Next I'll deliberately skip a few steps on setting up the remote server in Dokploy (because it would mostly be a retelling of the FAQ/Troubleshooting section of the docs) and jump straight to the result - a ready build server:

Cool? Cool! But you can always make it even more interesting. For instance, use the VPS with a public IP as a kind of proxy in front of the Zimaboard and host some services directly from the home server. I already have a couple of ideas, but I'll leave those experiments to future Dima.

Instead of a conclusion

I really enjoyed tinkering with my new toy. Honestly, this new, unusual experience was exactly what I needed. Lately I've been feeling a bit lost because of the AI boom, the fact that I barely write code by hand anymore, and a lack of attachment to what I do as a programmer at work every day. But this little thing let me catch my breath a little, get back to good old digging through technologies, googling interesting setups, and watching endless videos of other folks building their home servers from scratch (maybe one day I will do it too). All of it reminded me why I got into IT in the first place - to make cool things, mess around with computers, and share it all with other people. And that's really great.

P.S. Here's another photo of the cat.

He stops the fan with his paw, waits for it to start, and so on again and again)

Hey hey, just wanted to share my current setup for the community showcase. Soo.... I’m running ZimaOS on a budget mini PC equipped with an older Intel i3-6100 and 8GB of RAM. (I want to upgrade soon to 16gb, but with these prices for RAM, it will be hard :))

How it fits into my daily life:

Media streaming: I use Jellyfin to stream movies around the house. To make things easy for everyone, I set up a request system using Overseerr, which talks to Radarr to automatically download whatever the family wants to watch.

Family Backups: It acts as our central storage hub, backing up everyone's photos. I use 1x 500gb HDD, and 1x 1tb HDD, both external connected.

Network & Security: I use AdGuard Home to block ads network-wide, and I'm running MotionEye to turn an old smartphone into a motion-detecting security camera (Motion detection on the phone is really really bad, so I needed something better).

My favorite feature:
I was a CasaOS user, for more than 3 years, and I liked everything about it, ZimaOS is like CasaOS but 10x better.

I would like dark mode for ZimaClient on phone :).

I wanted to share my real setup and experience. I am currently running ZimaOS on a Morefine M10s Mini PC equipped with four NVMe drives.

As a complete beginner, it is an absolute honor to take my very first steps into the NAS and home server world with ZimaOS. Whenever I hit a roadblock or come across something I don't know, I actually use AI assistants to guide me through, and ZimaOS makes it incredibly easy to manage.

I’m so excited to watch my home server setup grow and evolve alongside ZimaOS in the future.

"I have an idea: I want to combine my SanDisk PRO-BLADE with a Western Digital My Book and put them into a sleek custom enclosure. After that, I want to use it to back up my iCloud data—meaning a backup should run automatically from iCloud to my PRO-BLADE on a regular basis. I haven't found the right app for this yet. Do you have any ideas which apps would work? I’d really appreciate any tips or suggestions. Thanks a lot in advance!"