GOOOOOOD morning people, So today i just wanted to share with you the Prototype ZimaCube Pro i have recieved in for testing and validation.
Its been a mad ride but finally feel like i’m at a point that i can share some useful information with the community
So First up a big shout out to the team at IceWhale who have made this happen and to Western Digital for providing the disks used in these tests.
Of course some want to see what’s coming so here is my first look and review of the Prototype ZimaCube Pro (please remember that things may change between this prototype and the release version…)
And of course unboxing of the disks from WD:
And some quick fan noise tests:
Full Speed
Auto Speed:
Anything specific you would like to see, let me know
Speed / performance testing as promised -
Obviously there are other situations but i tried to cover the main ones:
***** I have identified some issues with the EDP connection leading to slow disk speeds, I will update the results as soon as I have this issue resolved *****
The following drives have been used for the disk testing:
4x 1tb WD Black SN770 m.2 NVME
6x 8tb HGST UltraStar HE SATA
1x 3.8tb HGST SN200 U.2 NVME
Onboard NVME supplied by IW.
After feedback from the community, I have added some Audio checks using a DB Meter on my phone. This is not super scientific. it was a free app on my phone. Audio taken approx 1ft away from ZimaCube Pro on my desk.
I used the stock cooler that came with my Prototype ZimaCube (which is the same blower style fitted on the release N100)
I then swapped out to a SilverStone SST-AR09-115XS
I also purchased a 12v - Noctua NF-A6x25
Does the sled share PCIe lanes with the bays through a PCIe switch? Benchmark kind of looks like the sled is getting 2x3.0 or 1x4.0 so what happens if you test a spinner RAID in the SATA bays and an NVMe RAID in the 7th bay simultaneously?
I’m regularly getting 2 GB/s from a single NVMe (Gen 4.0x4) ZFS pool over 2x10 Gbe SMB MultiChannel doing large file copies using the Finder to and from from my Mac Studio and preliminary testing shows about 20% higher using Thunderbolt Networking so that’s my current performance benchmark. The NAS is a Ugreen NAsync 6800 running the current release of TrueNAS Scale (Dragonfish).
The numbers I get using disk benchmarking programs I’ve tried are problematic I think because TrueNAS caching and compression so I’m reduced to real-world transfer speeds (which have their own set of problems).
when installing the Silverstone AR09 cooler, did you need to remove the motherboard backplate or was it a simple swap?
what temperatures did you notice after the upgrade?
