Mastodawn

Elena. (she/ her)Mar 31, 2025

Trying to decide if a 2-bay NAS is overkill (for me who does not know what she's doing anyway) and if a single board computer like the Zima board is enough for a start.
The latter is decidedly cheaper too.
You know, for a start into the home server thing.

Any advice? This is your chance.
Just to be clear: I've been researching this for months, maybe even years by now. I have ideas about which NAS to get (if I should go that route), and I am mentioning the Zima board deriberatley (instead of a Raspberry Pi). So I'm not a super clueless noob noob. But still unsure enough.

Edited to add that I am in the EU. Maybe that‘s useful info for those who might want to reply.

Thank you to everybody who‘s already replied. I‘ll get back to you later, when I have more headspace and time.

#homeServer #NAS #singleBoardComputer #ZimaBoard

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Matthew Mar 31, 2025

@theresmiling for what it's worth, my experience. on a Raspberry Pi 4, but my understanding is the Zima and Pi 4 are roughly comparable (but Zima is x86 so some more flexibility) so it may give some indication what you can do with that board and if it may suit your needs.

running a small home server for about 18 months. mostly for fun just to learn. main things i'm running are Immich (photo storage), Grocy (pantry inventory) and Wallabag (article archive, like Pocket). i have a few other things but they're the main ones. my Pi 4 has 4GB or ram - i'm coming up on that now, so i am considering an upgrade to something with 8GB.

it all works just fine. Immich does a bunch of on-device machine learning stuff - face tagging, 'smart search' (eg search for rainbow and it'll show your photos of rainbows), that kind of thing. my first photo import of around 20k photos and a few hundred videos made the Pi unresponsive for a day or two, due to processing the ml on cpu. i had not adjusted the concurrency to one thread, so it took all threads and 100% - my own mistake really. besides that, it's pretty capable for a solo photo storage setup.

i'm running it all from a 250GB sata m.2 drive in a third party case (argon one). sata because Pi 4 does not have nvme or usb3 so no need for a faster drive. i haven't filled the drive yet with 25k photos and 1k videos. but i am planning to get an external non-nas caddy such as icybox or qnap (non-nas because i'll just attach it as storage and manage raid through the os).

for os itself i'm running Alma Linux - very solid and stable, enterprise-ready so very reliable. basically never goes down unless i restart it. i opted for non-gui os because i wanted to become comfortable / proficient using terminal and ssh so it was a learning experience. and same reason for enterprise-compatible os - wanted to learn that specifically.

my device is not accessible outside of my home. it's something i want to figure out, but it's more complex and right now i'm mostly at home anyway so low priority for me.

i dunno if this is the kind of reply you're after, apologies if not. any questions or whatever feel free. i've become a big fan of 'learning by doing' - think there's a lot to be said for just getting something, using it, if you need to upgrade later you can. if the Zima doesn't give you the power to do everything you want later, you can always repurpose it for some other tasks such as monitoring another device when you've learned more about what you enjoy most from this journey.

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Elena. (she/ her)Apr 1, 2025

@picard This is indeed a great reply, thank you!
Eventually I'd like to make my possible home server acessible from outside as well, though that is not a priority right now at the beginning.
One step at a time. And lots to think about.

Someone said the Zima board turned out to be a dusty cable heavy mess. Do you find the RasPi is that too?

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Matthew

@theresmiling you're welcome.

one step at a time is the right approach in my opinion. start with something you can achieve, learn, enjoy. the latter is important too - it should feel good too! and i'm sure you will enjoy it. there's something great about taking control like this, even in a small way at first. it's liberating and empowering.

re: the dust. i did wonder about that from the Zima - it looks designed to go in an open-sided frame, on display, for people who enjoy seeing this - it looks pretty nice but does look harder to clean, however i can understand the motivation to actually see this stuff too. my Pi is in a 'sealed' case - fairly small, maybe 10x10x3 cm, just a few small air vents. very easy to keep clean, just run a duster over the top and it's done. minimal cabling - power, ethernet and a data cable that will run into a small ups if i ever get round to setting that up 😄 i'd totally recommend some sort of easy to clean case over something open, personally. the amount of dust that seems to get sucked towards hardware 😄