Question for you knowers on Zimaboard 2 and build

Insight & Feedback
1

I’ve been playing with ZimaOS on older hardware and like what I see..

Although not sure on some things.

I am not sure my nVidia GT730 is being used for Frigate. I’m about to pull the trigger on a Zimaboard 2 1664.

Here is the uses, small NAS probably 2 - 4TB spinners, I use HomeAssistant, Frigate, with six cameras, will be getting a Coral USB, and a PCIe GPU,

Question 1: What would be a good choice for GPU? To use Coral for detection and GPU for encoding and streams.

Question 2: Should I use the 2 drives separately, as in one for camera recordings, or just use a shared folder on a RAID?

2

I believe the best Frigate setup on ZimaBoard 2 is Coral USB for detection + Intel iGPU (VAAPI/QuickSync) for video decode/encode, and no discrete GPU at all. Frigate recommends hardware acceleration for video decode because CPU-only gets heavy quickly. If you still want a PCIe GPU, I suggest a low power NVENC card like NVIDIA T400/T600 (or GTX 1650 GDDR6). ZimaBoard 2 is PCIe 3.0 x4. For storage, I suggest keeping drives separate: OS/AppData on SSD and Frigate recordings on a dedicated HDD. RAID is optional for uptime, but separate disks is usually the cleanest and most reliable for CCTV workloads.