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Earlier this year we reviewed the [2]ZimaBoard 2 for building a Linux home storage server. That was a nifty little device but for those looking for a more polished product than assembling your storage devices in cardboard cut-outs and the like, IceWhale has launched the ZimaCube 2. The ZimaCube 2 is a nice and polished, literal cube, to serve as your personal cloud / network attached storage (NAS) device.

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The ZimaCube 2 is IceWhale's take on delivering a complete and polished NAS storage device for your home / small office use. The ZimaCube 2 accommodates plenty of storage with six HDD/SSD drive bays and four NVMe SSD slots. Plus there is 40 Gbps connectivity via Thunderbolt 4 for speedy direct-to-PC transfers, dual Intel i226 2.5 GbE Ethernet, and 10GbE Marvell AQC113 Ethernet with the ZimaCube 2. There is also an SSD on the ZimaCube 2 separately as the 256GB NVMe SSD operating system drive.

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Making this more interesting than many NAS devices on the market is that the ZimaCube 2 is powered by an Intel Core i3 1215U 6-core or Core i5 1235U 10-core CPU, depending upon the customized model. This allows for the Thunderbolt 4 connectivity and a lot more performance than the many personal NAS devices on the market making use of an ARM SoC. Additionally, the ZimaCube 2 can be equipped with up to 64GB of DDR5 memory for allowing a lot more computing possibilities from this device.

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The ZimaCube 2 sports four USB-A 3.0 and one USB-C 3.0 / Thunderbolt port for connectivity besides the Ethernet. There is DisplayPort and HDMI output if wanting to make use of the ZimaCube 2 as an Intel mini PC or just for easy local/headed administration of the NAS/server.

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The ZimaCube 2 is largely composed out of aluminum besides plastic fan grills. This device had a nice feel to it and was easy to install 2.5-inch SSDs and four NVMe SSDs.

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Accessing the motherboard for the PCI Express slots was easily done via removing four screws and popping the top lid. One limitation of the ZimaCube 2 is that the dual PCI Express slots are limited to PCIe 4.0 x4 and PCIe 3.0 x2 connectivity, which can be limited if planning to install a GPU or other high speed adapters into these slots. Similarly, the NVMe slots were operating at PCIe 4.0 rather than the newer PCIe 5.0. In any case these slower PCIe speeds are sufficient for most SOHO uses of personal NAS devices.

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Also on the performance side, the ZimaCube 2 base configuration with 8GB of DDR5-4800 was in a single channel configuration though if going for higher memory capacities is where it will ship in a dual channel configuration.

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Like with the ZimaBoard 2, the ZimaCube 2 ships with IceWhale's ZimaOS personal-cloud platform that can be accessed from a web browser and then popular network/file protocols. Or with the ZimaCube 2 not being locked-down and running on Intel x86_64, you can easily load up your own operating system of choice.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=zimacube-2&image=zimacube_2_1_lrg

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/review/zimaboard2

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=zimacube-2&image=zimacube_2_2_lrg

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=zimacube-2&image=zimacube_2_8_lrg

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=zimacube-2&image=zimacube_2_4_lrg

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=zimacube-2&image=zimacube_2_5_lrg

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=zimacube-2&image=zimacube_2_6_lrg

[8] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=zimacube-2&image=zimacube_2_11_lrg

[9] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=zimacube-2&image=zimacube_2_9_lrg