I Wanted This NAS To Be Good... | ZimaCube Review

the new Zac Cube from Ice whale looks amazing it has the affordable and efficient n100 CPU six hot swappable Drive Bays four nvme slots and lots of room for expansion so what's not to love well quite a few things actually I really wanted this thing to be a home run for the home lab Community but sadly the Zac cube is possibly just a really good example of how to ruin a great idea let's get into it [Music] now if you're watching this you're likely interested in technology and perhaps you even want to transform that interest into a rewarding career in a field like cyber security if so you're in luck because today's sponsor Southern New Hampshire University can help make that a reality Southern New Hampshire University is accredited nonprofit and has surprisingly affordable tuition plus it was voted one of the country's most Innovative universities by US News and World Report with hacks and breaches in the news constantly it's no surprise that cyber security is a booming industry with 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description to get started this is the Zac Cube and before we get started I do want to mention that ice whale sent this over for review but as always I didn't take any money and can say whatever I want about it which is probably going to be pretty obvious here soon now I also want to note that this is technically a prototype so keep that in mind while watching this but I do think pretty much everything I cover will impact your decision to potentially buy or not buy one of these hey guys really quick this is future me I just want to note the fact that the motherboard for this zma Cube was in fact a prototype did cause some issues however I decided to leave all of those issues in the video but I will do a pretty comprehensive followup towards the end so make sure you watch till the end all right back to past me the Zac cube is a Kickstarter project from Ice whale that wrapped up its campaign in December of last year there are actually two different models the Zac Cube and the Zac Cube Pro I just have the standard Zac Cube so that's mostly what I'll be focusing on for this video the standard Zac Cube features the n100 a low powerered Alder Lake n CPU powered by four efficiency cores with a max turbo frequency of 3.4 GHz it also comes with 8 gbes of ddr4 soda memory as well as a 256 GB NVM SSD what makes this system really interesting though is all of the potential expandability on the front there's obviously the six hot swappable 3 and 1 12 in Drive Bays as well as this removable u.2 carrier card that has room for two more nvme ssds there's also the power button audio jack two USB 3.0 ports as well as one type-c port on the back there's two more USB 3.0 ports two 2.0 ports an HDMI and display port as well as the DC Barrel Jack and a cosos reset button you also get dual Intel I 226v 2 1/2 GB ethernet ports on the inside there are two more m.2 nvme slots as well as an m.2 e key slot for the Wi-Fi two morea ports and an internal USB 2.0 Port there's also a bu6 and by8 a pcie slot but more on that in a bit the build quality is actually really solid with most of the case being metal actually when it was delivered I thought they sent drives with it just because the box was so heavy holding it right now is actually pretty uncomfortable the plastic bit covering the drive Bays feels really cheap though and it's kind of awkward to get off I personally just like the look of it with it off so I kept it that way getting to the motherboard and internals is actually really simple there's just four screws on the sides of the case and then you lift the top off the drive leads are pretty nice they feel somewhat solid and they also have these led indicators for which Bay are occupied as well as disc activity for cooling there's a small fan for the CPU as well as two 80 mm fans on the back however those aren't directly connected to the motherboard but rather the SATA back plane speaking of the back plane that gets interesting obviously it has the six Zeta ports for the hot swappable drives and also has a u.2 port for that dual m.2 adapter but rather than using a PCI Riser or other standard connector it actually uses an EDP or embedded display port cable which is usually used for displays and laptops theoretically this cable can handle Thunderbolt or pcie signals so it works carrying three lanes of pcie 3 between the motherboard and back plane it is an interesting solution but I hate that it essentially makes this chassis non upgradable I personally would have preferred something like sff SAS cables or oculink or just something that would have made this case a bit more usable down the road the back plane gets power from a 12volt header on the motherboard and as I mentioned earlier here it has two fan headers for the case fans when I first turned the system on it booted into an install of diet P which was also running cost OS and I think this is just for the Prototype stage and these will all eventually ship with ice whales zema OS when running diet pie I didn't notice anything odd and I connected to Casa OS with no issues however I did note that the system was consuming around 28 Watts at idle without any hard drives or anything that's a little bit higher than I would have hoped however it's important to remember that the power draw doesn't just come from the CPU even with something like the n100 there's still a lot of other things running in the system that are going to draw power and you're not going to get that 6 watt Idol you might get with just some tiny little mini PC there is currently a beta version of Zemo OS that I installed but it's still very much in beta there are quite a few features missing like for example there's still not support for raid which is probably something you want with A6 Bay naaz and before you go all well just do it in the command line in Zemo OS there isn't one this video is mostly covering the hardware though not really the software especially because with this system you can install any operating system you want so I decided to go ahead and move on to something you guys probably all really want to see Windows I'm just kidding but I did install Windows 10 mostly just because I like Hardware info and wanted to sort of see what's going on under the hood now the first issue I ran into is that the Intel I 226v NX don't work in Windows 10 at least not out of the box now it's possible you could get the drivers working although I didn't have any luck in that regard but the drivers do work on Windows 11 11 so that's probably your best bet if you're wanting to for some reason run Windows on a Zac cube a lot of people love the n100 CPU that's in this thing but it does have one big downside it only has nine Lanes of PCI gen 3 and there's a lot of stuff going on in the Zac Cube to see what all was going on I decided to populate just about everything I put four nvme ssds in all of the m.2 sockets I put a 2 and 1/2 GB ethernet adapter into the m.2 E key slot and then I put two 10 gig cards and the two pcie slots I also put in two hard drives just to make sure that SATA was working and everything did show up but with some caveats first the m.2 E ke Wi-Fi slot actually does support pcie which I was not expecting with only nine lanes available the two m.2 sockets on the motherboard are limited to just buy one while the two on the adapter card are at buy two but they share two lanes of PCI gen 3 the two PCI slots are pretty misleading the by6 slot is actually only wired up for two lanes of PCI and the by8 slot is only wired up for one the by6 slot only being wired up for two lanes actually kind of makes sense there are some cards that really need that full by6 physical socket but will work just fine with only one or two or four lanes maybe just with some degraded performance but the by8 open-ended slot could have just been a buy one slot and that seems pretty misleading in my opinion at first I thought they were just trying to keep things the same between the standard model of the Zac Cube and the pro model but that doesn't really line up either because the pro model has two PCI slots that are at by4 and bu 2 when trying to use one of the two Marvel 10 GB NYX that I had installed I was only able to get transfer speeds of around 400 megabytes per second which I found to be odd even one lane of PCI gen 3 could be pretty close to a 10 GB connection now the answer to that was right in front of my face but I didn't quite catch it until later on so more on that in a bit I don't think many people actually plan to use windows with the Zac Cube so I decided to move on to inst installing tunaz I added four more hard drives giving me a total of 6 4 TB hard drives however I only had four of these Western Digital red plus 5400 RPM drives so I used two of these hgst 7200 RPM drives that I bought when I was doing the home lab challenge I also kept two of the m.2 ssds to be able to test out some flash storage the install all went really smooth the 2 and a half gig Nicks were recognized and working and the 10 gbit card was also recognized I set up two pools one with the six hard drives and then another with just the 2s s SDS other than the fact that the system was now drawing around 70 Watts everything seemed to be going well at least until I tried some more 10 gig transfers I could still only get 400 megabytes per second over the T gig connection regardless of whether I was using the hard drives or flash storage I also saw the exact same result in I perf 3 confirming that it wasn't a storage limitation before digging too deep I decided to give UNR a shot now because I only have the basic license I did need to remove two of the hgst drives to stay within the six device l limit with just one 10 gig card the two NV ssds and four of the 5400 RPM hard drives the system idle power draw dropped down to a much more reasonable 53 Watts or so those 7200 RPM drives definitely draw a good bit of power once again everything here seemed to be working totally fine until I tried transfers over that 10 gig connection where I was still limited to 400 megab per second I double checked everything with my network I swapped to a different Nick I swapped cables I tried different ports on my switch all with the same result with two lanes of PCI gen 3 10 gig should easily be achievable even with one lane of gen 3 or two lanes of Gen 2 you should still be able to get around like 8 gbit or so but it was almost like I was only using one lane of pcie Gen 2 when looking into lspci and D message things started to make a little more sense in D message there was a warning showing that the bus with the tting Nick was downgraded to just one lane of PCI AG 2 which would make sense as to why we were only getting 400 megab per second so I started looking a little bit more into why that was the case now I'm not a hardware engineer or anything and frankly I have very little experience when it comes to PCI topography and such but what I found was that the bu16 or really the buy 2 PCI slot is Downstream from an as media 1806 PCI Express switch that switch according to what I can tell from lspci only supports two lanes of 5 gig transfers per second or PCI agent 2 I also looked up the as media 1806 and it's also listed there as having an upstream bandwidth of just pcie gen 2x2 the second part of the problem is the root Port that's Upstream of the PCI switch that's configured for pcie Gen 3 or 8 Gat transfers per second but only supports one lane so because there's only one lane between the root port and the as media switch and the as media switch only supports PCI agent 2 realistically this by 16 slot which was advertised as PCI gen 3x two only has an effective bandwidth of PCI Gen 2 by one and that's not even the worst of it the pcie by two slot isn't the only thing Downstream from that as media switch the other PCI slot and the SATA controller for the SATA ports on the motherboard are also connected to that same pcie switch so what that means is that both of the slots and the SATA ports are all just sharing one lane of PCI Gen 2 that's a lot different from the collective three to four lanes of PCI gen 3 that are advertised and to show a bit of a real world example of this you can watch a file transfer coming from the T gig connection all of a sudden dip down whenever I unpause the file transfer coming from a SATA SSD plugged into the motherboard now like I said I'm not an expert which is why I put out the nerd signal and got some help from some other amazing YouTubers and journalists that helped me confirm and clarify what I was looking at I'd specifically like to shout out wle from level one Tex for sitting on like an hour and a half long call with me helping me sort through everything now it is important to remember that this is technically a prototype and I'm not even sure exactly what stage it's in and it's totally possible that these issues are corrected before the final release however I think that might be a bit tricky even if the 1806 PCI switches are upgraded to a gen 3 capable switch the topology still wouldn't line up with what's advertised you would still be limited to just one lane that shared across both pcie slots and the SATA controller and while the topology might change that's going to be difficult with the n100 I know a lot of you guys love that chip but it does have one huge downside and that it barely has any pcie lanes once I realized the issues with the PCI slots I decided to look a little bit more and see if there were some other issues that might exist and I found that there's actually another as media 1806 that's Upstream of the two 2 and2 gbit nicks the m.2 E key Wi-Fi slot and one of the internal m.2 sockets once again that means that all four of those devices are sharing just a single Lane of pcie Gen 2 that's not ideal for clarification sake the only things that are actually running at PCI gen 3 speeds are the SATA controller for the back plane one of the byy one two sockets on the motherboard and a pcie gen 3 switch which is supporting the Gen 3x2 nvme slots on the carrier card however both of those drives are going to be sharing a bu two connection I reached out to iell about this both with my initial concerns and suspicions and then with a follow-up email outlining more of what I had discovered after more than 2 weeks without a response I finally heard back from my contact at ice whale only for them to let me know they were stepping down from the company they did CC me on an email with product manager for the Zac Cube but I still haven't heard anything from that individual either so it's now been over a month since I originally asked for clarification about these findings and I still haven't received an actual response if they do reach out after the video has been published I will make sure to include their response in a pinned comment down below the massive discrepancies with pcie are a really big disappointment but that's not even the only problem I have with this product's advertising first of all can we just address the massive elephant in the room this is marketed as a cube but clearly that is a blatant lie okay sorry I just needed to cut the tension a little bit there are plenty of issues with the marketing though and many instances the product is marketed as the Zac Cube and shown with a starting price of $4.99 for the early bird pricing or now $6.99 however it's surprisingly difficult to find the actual specs of just the Zac Cube because whether in ads the kickstarter page or now the official store listing you'll immediately just be hit with all of the specs for the pro model even now on their official store list for pre-orders on the base model page you'll see nothing but features for the pro model from Thunderbolt ports to PCI E 4 to the upgraded Intel CPU and all of this is done without any mention that these features are only included on the Zac Cube Pro a product that costs nearly twice as much it's not until you scroll all the way down that you can finally actually see the information for the actual product you're trying to look at now you might be thinking well every company markets their Halo products and yeah sure I understand that and I do always think it's important for consumers to not trust the marketing and actually look into the specs but in this instance it doesn't seem you can even on the spec sheet for the standard Zac Cube the info doesn't seem to be correct the n100 model shows a single by4 PCI slot which is I believe the original design but they had to scrap that and mentioned it in an update on the kickstarter the pro model still shows bu16 and bu4 PCI slots which they also announced in an update that that would not be the case so it's hard to argue that consumer should ignore the marketing and look at the actual specs when those are also incredibly misleading I personally don't like kickstarters and I don't recommend buying from them but I do understand that in that development phase information is going to need to change but I don't think I have that same amount of Grace for an actual product listing where a company is currently taking your money for an actual product once again this is a prototype and maybe all of these problems are going to be fixed and I'm ranting for no reason so they responded just a few hour hours ago and it's less than 48 hours now until this video gets published but to be fair I did in a follow-up email to the product manager say that if they got me a response by today I would make sure and get it into the final cut so here we are I didn't have a ton of time to put this all together so I'm just sitting in my messy office with some bullet points up on my screen but I'd like to talk about their response and what I learned in just the past few hours so the product manager did in fact let me know that this is a version 2.0 motherboard but they've just wrapped up production of their version 3.0 motherboard which primarily fixes some of the issues that I found on this one I want to be clear though that I don't exactly know whether or not the version 3.0 is what's going to ship with the final product or not now actually some of these updates were posted publicly on their Kickstarter however it was published on January 19th and in my defense I didn't think I needed to check Kickstarter for updates for a product that's now listed on their website for pre-order but it is on Kickstarter and they cover some of the pcie issues there now obviously I don't have the version 3.0 motherboard but the product manager did send me some schematics as well as some pictures of that motherboard but they asked me not to share those publicly so I'm going to go ahead and respect that and just try to describe to you what I think is relevant now the really good news is they revised the layout to in fact give this buy two slot two lanes of PCI gen 3 directly from the PCH which is great the PCI by one slot is still going to be behind a PCI switch but that switch has been updated to an as media 2806 which is a gen 3x2 switch that means this will at least be able to operate at one lane of PCI gen 3 it will be sharing bandwidth with the two Intel 2 and2 gbit nxs as well as the m.2 Wi-Fi card at least maybe the picture on the kickstarter update shows the m.2 Wi-Fi slot Downstream from the as media 2806 but on the schematic diagram that I can't share with you guys that's actually another m.2 SSD D in fact the Wi-Fi slot doesn't seem to be anywhere on the schematics they sent me so I'm not really sure which one is correct I also found it interesting that on this Kickstarter update there only seems to be one m.2 SSD on the entire thing at least other than the two that are on the u.2 adapter so I'm not really sure where the other m.2 slot on the motherboard is but I do get any clarification on this I will put it in a pinned comment on the kickstarter update it shows that there's one lane of PCI 3.0 going to the u.2 adapter which would actually be worse than the previous version where it had two so I'm not sure if that's a mistake because it also shows three lanes of PCI 3.0 going to the six SATA port and on the schematic it shows three lanes going to a pcie connector which I think is the EDP cable which would line up with the revision that I have where there's one lane of pcie going to the SATA controller on the back plane and then two going to the u.2 adapter so once again I'm not entirely sure my guess is it's what's on the diagram which would be two lanes going to the u.2 adapter for those byy two nvme ssds and then one lane going to the SATA controller on the back plane once again I really don't know if I get some clarification on that I'll make sure and put it down in a Pinn comment I really hope it's two lanes going to the u.2 card otherwise what was 2 by two NVM ssds are now just going to be by one and I know pretty much for sure that the two nvme slots on the motherboard are going to be by one as well another change on the revision three of the motherboard is that the two SATA ports up top are now not there which probably makes sense in terms of not having intended PCI Lanes but it is still sort of a bummer I don't think they directly marketed these anywhere on their website or on the kickstarter but they did send out a bunch of boards that included these SATA ports to YouTubers and other media Outlets that did mention those two SATA ports so for anyone expecting those two SATA ports based off of the media coverage that's going to be a little bit of a bummer now overall these changes to the motherboard are good having two lanes of pcie Gen 2 on the by two slot does allow ow it to actually do some pretty useful things like having a 10 gig Nick or something like that maybe not a RTX A2000 but there's still a lot you can do with two lanes of PCI gen 3 having the other PCI slot the two 2 and a half GB nxs and potentially either a Wi-Fi card or another SSD Downstream of that PCI switch isn't great but realistically that's kind of just what you're left with when you're using something like the n100 now that configuration isn't necessarily that bad especially if it's a Wi-Fi card that's Downstream of that switch but if it is an SSD and you're heavily utilizing the buy one slot and using dual 2 and a half GB networking you're probably going to run into some bandwidth limitations now one thing I didn't really cover a ton but I did ask in my email was whether or not the fans on the back plane have any sort of control or whether or not there's any sort of temperature monitoring and sadly the answer to both of those is no now you might be wondering why I didn't just refilm this entire video and I have three reasons for that first I've already already pushed this video back multiple times now originally this video was supposed to go live over a month ago so by pushing it back waiting for a response from Ice whale I've had to shift a lot of stuff around losing time and frankly money at a certain point I just had to set a date when the video was going to go live whether or not I actually got a response from Ice whale I understand it's probably frustrating for you that some of the information in this video was from a prototype and is already outdated but that in of itself is sort of the problem ice whale could have communicated to me and other creators and Outlets when they sent these out what version of prototype these were and some of the issues that they knew of I mean realistically if you put PCI Gen 2 switches into this motherboard you know it's going to operate at pcie Gen 2 that's just kind of straightforward so there are some things they could have let me know when they first sent this out that would have been helpful but they also could have just responded a little bit sooner letting me know there isn't updated revision to the motherboard that would have saved me a lot of time from digging into this and trying to sort out all of the issues the second reason that I didn't completely refilm this is that I sort of wanted you guys to have a better understanding of where I was coming from to have a better understanding of the process and how I got here and also see what ice wh's response was like which kind of leads me to my third and final reason which is that frankly none of this really changes my recommendation to you the consumer the updated motherboard definitely seems like an improvement but that doesn't negate all of the other issues as of today which is 2 days before this video gets published the specs of the updated motherboard still aren't reflected on their website and honestly I don't even know if they reflect what's on the update on the kickstarter because the kickstarter update doesn't reflect the schematics they sent me I really don't even know and I didn't really even talk about the pro model much because I don't have it on hand but there were plenty of revisions and updates on the kickstarter for that and those specs definitely don't reflect any of the marketing that's still plastered all over the kickstarter their website and the pre-order site so honestly even with some of these clarifications and updates everything is still just really messy now personally I like to follow the adage of not attributing to malice what can be easily explained with incompetence and not to say ice wh is an incompetent company but they are a fairly small company and this is a pretty big project I don't want to assume that ice well is doing anything maliciously however the nature of their decisions doesn't change the reality or the impact for you the customer I'm actually really glad that with the revised motherboard things aren't quite as bad as they originally seemed but realistically that's still not going to change how I was going to end this video Even though I filmed my original video last week before I knew any of this the ending still makes sense so I think I'm just going to let that play out I hate beating up on this thing because like I said I really wanted it to be good I was really excited for it I wanted nothing more than for this to be a huge win for the home lab Community with six Drive bays and tons of expandability I mean it does have a really well-built case with potentially solid features honestly more features than I really think needs I personally would have been totally happy with just a single 2 and half GB Nick one or two by one or by two nbme slots and then a single by4 or even buy 2 PCI slots something like that but sadly that's not the case and it seems like a lot of the features that have been advertised and that might be the reason you want to get a Zac Cube don't really exist I really hope to have some good news for you guys down in a pinned comment and I hope that ice well can get all of this stuff sorted out and I hope that all the people who have already bought one of these are super happy with their purchase that's genuinely what I want to see but all I can say for now is if you're interested in buying one of these don't at least not until there's a bit more clarification that's about it for this one though so if you liked it maybe give it a thumbs up maybe subscribe and maybe even consider becoming a raid member either here on YouTube or through patreon there you can get early access to videos as well as in behind the scenes content and more as always thank you guys so much for watching stay curious and I really can't wait to see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Hardware Haven

Views: 188,923

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Id: qfXieR52j8o

Length: 26min 7sec (1567 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2024