ZimaBoard 2 1664 Starter Kit review: it's a cool and affordable DIY NAS

IceWhale Technology reached out to me asking if I was interested in testing the ZimaBoard 2, and after convincing them to send me the Starter Kit, it arrived at my doorstep in May. A bit of background: it is a Shanghai-based Chinese company founded in 2020, which specializes in single-board servers and personal cloud solutions. From searching around online, user feedback on the company and ZimaOS is mostly positive, so we're off to a good start.

In addition, I should probably point out that although they do not have a large portfolio of NAS devices, with just four of what they do offer, they seem to have covered everything from a relatively low-priced entry point with the ZimaBoard 2, right up to the high end, with the ZimaCube 2 Creator Pack that even includes an NVIDIA RTX PRO 2000.

Anyway, as already mentioned, what we have today is the ZimaBoard 2 Starter Kit, and here are the full specifications:

As you can see above, there are two variants of the ZimaBoard 2. The lesser variant has half the eMMC storage and 8 GB less RAM, although it also costs $60 less than the top variant we are testing today. The above pricing is only for the ZimaBoard 2. I put the MSRP of the Starter Kit next to it in brackets, although as of publishing, it is discounted to $534.50.

The ZimaBoard 2 started life on Kickstarter and shipped to backers in August last year. It became available via the official website in late 2025 and Q1 2026.

This hobbyist NAS contains the still relatively new N150 Intel CPU released in the first quarter of 2025, with support for DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.1, although in this case, the memory is integrated into the board itself, so it will not be possible to upgrade or expand the amount. It also supports AV1 decoding, as well as H.264, VP8, VP9, H.265 (8 bit), and H.265 (10 bit). The different capabilities in the Alder Lake-N (and Twin Lake) series are listed below.

The CPU is part of the Twin Lake series that sits near the bottom of the N-series, designed for low- powered systems and entry-level laptops, and as such has a base level TDP of just 6W.

As I have noted before, we are seeing another NAS with a great amount of RAM. It's important to mention that the ZimaBoard 2's memory is integrated into the base board (which is why they have two variants of it). As a reminder, up until a couple of years ago, it was commonplace to only get 2 or 4GB max on a flagship Synology or QNAP home NAS. Ever since the likes of TerraMaster and more have entered the market with ample RAM sizes included in their NAS offerings, it has gone a long way in forcing the hands of the traditional makers to up their game a bit.

First impressions

The Starter Kit came in one outer box with several packages inside it (shown above). I forgot to take pics of it because when it arrived, it wasn't clear what was inside, and I had to confirm with my contact that I received the entire Starter Kit.

In the box

• ZimaBoard 2
• ZimaBoard 2 HDD Expansion Bracket + PCIe card frame
• Zimaboard Mini DisplayPort Male to HDMI Female Cable 4K 60Hz
• Zimaboard PCIe 3.0 x4 to Dual NVMe M.2 SSD Adapter Card
• Quick guide [full online guide]
• Limited warranty notice
• Screws

Design

Where to start? You'd be forgiven for mistaking it as an SSD enclosure if not for all the ports on it. It is completely made out of metal, and the top is an entire heatsink. It has a premium feel about it, but it definitely looks like a hobby device. As you will see, the completed build looks like it belongs in a server or meter closet rather than as a showpiece on someone's desk.

On what I am calling the rear, there's a Mini DisplayPort (1.4), two 2.5 GbE ports, with Type A 3.1 USB ports, and then the barrel connector port.

Around the front, there are two SATA6 ports with a power connector in the middle.

One side is completely free of ports. On the other there's a slit that allows for the feed of a CPU fan cable, and a PCIe 3.0 X4 slot.

The top is entirely made up of a heatsink except for the extended height for the I/O on the rear. Around the other side, you can find the ZIMA branding and some regulatory information stamped near the bottom. As you may see from the bottom of the ZimaBoard 2, it scratches quite easily from just moving it around on my Ikea island.

Teardown

Before we get started, let's have a look at this thing on the inside.

The steps to get to the board are as follows:

1. Remove the four smaller Torx screws on the bottom of the ZimaBoard 2;
2. Remove the four larger Torx screws on the sides of the device;
3. Carefully unstick the CMOS battery from the PCB;
4. Remove two Phillips screws on the PCB;
5. Lift out the PCB.

Yes, as you can tell from the instructions, you need three different tools to remove Torx and Phillips screws (10 in total), and unhelpfully, one of the screws is located under the CMOS battery, which is stuck onto the PCB.

Building

Now comes the fun part. Because the ZimaSpace website does not provide any guidance on how to put the Starter Kit together. They only have guidance for connecting the CPU fan. However, they did upload a video to their YouTube channel that shows the entire process.

To install the fan, first remove the four screws on the bottom of the ZimaBoard 2, then on the inside, there is a CPU FAN connector where you can attach the fan, reattach the ZimaBoard 2 frame, and feed the fan cable through the provided slit. Then remove the nearest screw on the side and attach the fan frame to the side of the device using the same screw.

Remember those four screws we removed to access the CPU FAN? Longer screws are provided in the box with the HDD Expansion Bracket, which is what you will now need to attach the ZimaBoard 2 to it. Helpfully, the orientation on how to attach it is made obvious when the frame can only be screwed on at the same overall length as the ZimaBoard 2. If you do it the wrong way around (which is what I did initially) one side hangs off the frame, and it becomes difficult to attach the PCIe Adapter Card cable.

Next, it's time to attach the PCIe card frame, which is fastened with the help of 3.5-inch SATA HDD (3 screws). These are toolless screws that you can just use your fingers to fasten them with. Then it is time to connect the provided PCIe cable with the slot connector on one side of the ZimaBoard 2, feed it through the bottom of the HDD frame, and fasten it with two standoffs.

The PCIe 3.0 X4 card comes with a short bracket option, handy if you decide to place it inside a different NAS or rack server, but here we need the long bracket. Oddly enough, the M.2 standoffs were preinstalled into the 22110 position, but extra standoffs are included in the box, which I installed at the 2280 position for our use. I added a couple of MP44Q M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSDs (2 x 4TB) that can be availed on Amazon for $478.99 (the lowest price for 3 months) that TEAMGROUP supplied us with

Then we have the almost completed build, you just need to push the card into the PCIe slot. Unfortunately, IceWhale Technologies did not provide a screw for the PCIe card frame (this is also apparent in their own video).

Here it is at several different angles, with the last pic showing the SATA Y-Cable connected to the two WD Red Plus 4TB drives.

Setup and Usage

Next, you connect your cables to the I/O, and the ZimaBoard 2 powers on automatically, as there is no power button on the device. Power is controlled through the Settings in ZimaOS.

BIOS

The ZimaBoard 2 includes an Aptio BIOS from American Megatrends [1, 2, 3], and you can setup pretty much everything here including the boot order, which is locked to the UEFI OS, however above that choice you can enable or disable booting to a SATA/USB bootloader so this would still allow you to switch to an alternative bootloader and boot from it, or disable it to instead always start from the first disk with an OS installed on it.

Initial Setup

Upon connecting to the LAN and booting up, the ZimaBoard 2 can be reached by navigating to the IP address (shown if you have a monitor connected), or you can find it using the ZIMA Client desktop application, which is essentially a Zima device finder.

Initializing the ZimaBoard 2

The ZimaOS setup process is pretty straightforward, through a wizard, and in full above, it basically consists of setting up an account and some handy tips, and that's that!

Post Setup (ZimaOS update)

Upon first boot, you are alerted that there is a ZimaOS update from 1.5.0 to 1.6.1, which I applied; the full process is shown above with the changelog.

ZimaBoard 2 Storage Setup

Next, it is time to set up the storage. ZimaOS actually throws everything onto the eMMC flash drive; it is also the default location of AppData, which is definitely something to be wary about, as the 45GB available storage could fill up quickly.

HDDs

I first attempted to create a Storage Pool using the two 4TB WD Red Plus NAS drives, and got an error message:

failed to delete RAID info: mdadm: Couldn’t open /dev/nvme0n1 for write - not zeroing

After several attempts and then looking online, I discovered it was a bug with ZimaOS where the fix was simply to reboot ZimaOS and then try again, this time I was able to create a RAID mirror using the two drives.

SSDs

I did the same for the SSDs, as you will see in the above gallery, when I created the second Storage Pool, it only allowed me to select available drives.

ZimaBoard 2 AppData

ZimaOS comes with an App Store that includes a repository of almost 400 apps, so you will be able to find most of what you'll need for a NAS (although after a quick search, I wasn't able to find a Surveillance Manager), and now comes the important part: moving the default AppData location off the 45GB eMMC and onto a larger volume:

1. Open Settings
2. Then Apps
3. Then, in the Select a new location field, click on the new Storage volume you want to move it to (in my case, the Apps Storage Pool), which is the SSD RAID mirror.
4. Confirm the Migration warning
5. Be praised!

You can also do this for Docker (which by default installs onto the 45GB eMMC flash drive) and the User database.

Plex Setup

Next, I tested the configuration by installing the Plex Server app from the App Store. The library folders must already exist (which I placed into the Storage Pool). Plex Server setup is straightforward and requires very little configuration. In my case, all I had to do was add the media path I just created, which you can also browse to using the folder icon in the path field.

In addition, you can now map the new Media library in Windows Explorer using the Zima Client. Oddly enough, it is not possible to access the ZimaBoard 2 over the Network Neighborhood; you must map drives using the client, which is shown in the last image in the above gallery.

I watched one of my Blu-Ray rips, which is Dolby Vision with Dolby Atmos, and the content played fine with no stuttering or buffering, which is what anyone needs in this scenario.

ZimaBoard 2 Zima Client mobile app

There's also a client for mobile. It is pretty barebones, as shown in the above gallery, for example, the Apps screen launches the WebUI for that app, and the Backup must be done manually. On opening Backup, you can select internal storage folders on your phone to backup to the ZimaBoard 2's storage, and although this is constantly scanned, the backup action itself must be manually triggered. There is an option to allow foreground backup (last image in the above gallery), but this basically means the queued backup gets triggered when you manually open the app.

Benchmarking

A CrystalDiskMark test on a mapped network drive from within a Windows 11 25H2 PC (image above) connected over a 2.5 GbE was well within acceptable ranges. Writes were generally better on the SSD RAID mirror.

I also ran the NAS Performance tester, which tests the link speed performance. As you can see, it pretty much maxes out the 2.5GbE connection. Of course, you can also opt to bond the two 2.5 GbE connections for a bit more umph, but I didn't do that.

Thermals

Next, I measured some hotspots while playing content on Plex. It's fair to say this will perform better than a NAS that is enclosed in a metal or plastic case, as almost everything storage-wise is exposed! Anyway, the ZimaBoard 2 did not break a sweat with Plex streaming or disk benchmarks.

ZimaOS Factory Reset

ZimaOS does not include a factory reset option. Instead, you have to download the ZimaOS image and flash it to the eMMC manually.

The flashing process is shown in the above gallery.

The steps to do so are listed below:

1. Download the ZimaOS image here;
2. Open BalenaEtcher (Run as Administrator) and select the image;
3. Select your inserted USB drive (min 8 GB)
4. Flash to it;
5. Connect your USB drive, monitor, keyboard, USB hub (optional), mouse (optional), and network cable (recommended) to the ZimaBoard 2;
6. Connect power and press F11 continuously;
7. Select your USB drive starting with UEFI in the boot device menu;
8. Press Enter on the Install ZimaOS option;
9. Select /dev/mmcblk0 (MMC) flash drive as target;
10. Confirm with (three times) to wipe the target disk;
11. Wait a couple of minutes while ZimaOS installs;
12. Remove the USB drive and confirm with a reboot;
13. Your ZimaBoard 2 has been factory reset.

However, you don't have to stick with ZimaOS, in fact the company also offers official CasaOS images, that are based on Debian; or as they say themselves, put anything you want on this "hackable single board server" it's up to you.

Conclusion

I had a lot of fun putting this together. I've custom-built all my own PCs and servers since the 90s, and this is the first time I have had to put a NAS together. Even if the actual base ZimaBoard 2 was already a completed build, it still feels pretty custom.

I just wish that IceWhale Technology included a getting-started guide in the box for the Start Kit, which would have really completed this kit. Instead, I had to search for the official video on the YouTube channel to make sure I wasn't doing anything wrong.

So who is this for? Definitely the hobbyist who is comfortable building their own PC and servers. It also has a much smaller footprint than its nearest equivalent (in terms of specs), like the Beelink Me Pro, which is another NAS I will be testing soon. Although the Beelink does not come with the PCIe 3.0 X4 expansion, the ZimaBoard 2 Starter Kit suddenly looks to be a great bargain, even if it only offers the two 3.5-inch bays over the four in the other example.

It makes a lot of sense to use Intel's N150 chip inside a NAS; it is more than capable of doing what the ZimaBoard 2 is intended for, media streaming and backup.

It also looks like the IceWhale Technology staff are quite active in the official forums helping people with issues they come across with ZimaOS and the devices, peer support seems to be good as well, I was quickly able to find why I was not able to create a new Storage Pool in ZimaOS v1.6.1 even though that is quite a serious bug, hopefully it will be fixed in the next update.

If you are comfortable with the command line and Docker, you'll be fine. You can do great things with this hardware. This was my first time with ZimaOS. It seems a bit barebones in comparison to the likes of Synology DSM, TOS, and UGOS, but it has a ton of apps to get you started with your home or small business NAS.

Where to buy

As of publishing, IceWhale Technology is running a discount of up to 5% for the Starter Kit. If you opt to get just the ZimaBoard 2 itself, it does come with a SATA Y-Cable, so you will be able to connect up to two 3.5-inch HDDs to it.

• ZimaBoard 2 1668 Starter Kit for $534.50 on Amazon US (was $548.60)
• ZimaBoard 2 832 Starter Kit for $372.88 on Amazon US (was $390.60)
• Zimaboard 2 1668 (16GB+64GB) for $419.90 on Amazon US
• Zimaboard 2 832 (8GB+32GB) for $359.90 on Amazon

Disclosure: IceWhale Technology provided a free sample without any editorial input or review pre-approval.

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