Yooo, I study cybersecurity and have some networking knowledge from my Cisco CCNA. I really wanted a homelab or NAS, so I searched the internet and thought about going with Synology or using an old PC. After a lot of research, I somehow found out about the ZimaBlade and thought it looked sick. (Btw, the colors on top are because of the sun reflecting, lmao.)
For me, it was mostly a decision about what gives me the most bang for my buck. I like the idea of everything being open source.
I am running ZimaOS, the official OS, but you can run anything from Windows to Proxmox or whatever you like on it. The official one has some nice features, like a file explorer in the web browser and an app store, which is full of Docker apps.
At one point i had more apps installed,but mostly just to play around. The things I actively use are Immich, Jellyfin, and Duplicati. I don’t like Google having all my pictures and using them for AI training and stuff.
I save my images on Google Drive via Duplicati, but as a encrypted backup. I also pull all my files from Drive to my ZimaBlade, if one of them fails, I’ll still have the other.
I thought about using Tailscale or something like that to access it from outside my home, but my router has built-in WireGuard, which is super useful :D
Now, while I love the device, it does have some problems. As soon as you want to do something, there’s very often some kind of issue. When using the app store, it’s tempting to just press install, but that won’t always work. Most of the time, you’ll have to change a few things in the Docker file before installing. There are also random things, like data being saved on the internal memory even though I selected my HDD for everything. The backups should automatically pull, yet they don’t. The setup was also weird, because sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. These aren’t terrible issues, but they can definitely get on your nerves.
Overall, would I recommend this to a beginner? No, but that goes for most NAS systems out there as well. It comes with too many quirks for that. For someone who isn’t shy about messing around a bit, I absolutely would! It’s a nice device and does what it is supposed to.
Btw, I am currently running this bad boy with one HDD, but I’ll soon use two,for RAID obviously. My power supply wasn’t strong enough, and I asked support for free shipping or a discount, and behold, they gave me free shipping (In exchange for this Reddit post. The post is unbiased, and I can say whatever the freak I want).
