IceWhale Technology ZimaCube Pro review: Fast 10GBe network storage with a local twist

If you’re looking for a dainty wallflower of a storage box, skip this review. If you’re looking for a large-capacity network-attached storage (NAS) box to provide ton of storage space as well as run web apps, read on.

The ZimaCube is a cube-shaped (duh!), 6-bay server/storage enclosure that can function both over 10Gbe and Thunderbolt 4 port via an ethernet bridge. The handsome box measures approximately 8.75-inches deep, by 8.75 inches tall, by 9.5-inches wide–no, it’s not a perfect cube. Cubular? Cubist? All six SATA drive bays are 3.5-inch, housing six non-locking, easily-removal trays.

Note that the 3.5-inch trays don’t use quick-change, pop-out rails, you must use the provided screws to install drives. Smaller, finer-threaded screws are also provided for SATA SSDs.

There is what appears to be a seventh bay to the right. Technically it is and is referred to in the ZimaCube documentations as the seventh bay. However, it uses a different connector that mates with the provided single 4-slot PCIe M.2/NVMe adapter card. Said adapter is held in place by a captive thumb screw for easy removal.

The bays are covered by a magnetically attached face plate. Directly above it are two Type-A 3.0 USB ports (5Gbps), a 5Gbps Type-C port, 3.5 mm stereo headphone jack, and a quick copy button that immediately copies data from attached thumb drives and the like.

The back of the box is home to a single 10Gbps ethernet port, twin 2.5Gbps ethernet ports, two Type-A 2.0 USB ports, two Type-C Thunderbolt 4 ports (without the identifying logo), as well as both DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0 ports for attaching displays. To the left of the Thunderbolt 4 ports are the power jack and a pinhole reset button.

As you might guess, a server running a 10-core I5, with up to six HDDs and four NVMe SSDs like the ZimaCube ships with beefy power support: 19-volts and 11.58 amps to be specific. That should handle any drives you throw in the ZimaCube easily.

IceWhale didn’t provide any instructions on how to visit the interior of the unit. The lack of granular documentation was my least favorite thing about the ZimaCube Pro. Consequently, I simply started removing bolts. Fortunately, my first four choices (IceWhale “thoughtfully” uses hexagonal types) at the top of the unit allowed me up to pop the top to see the two half-height PCIe slots. You can add just about anything Linux has a driver for.

I was also able to view the populated M.2 slot. There’s another underneath, but it’s quite difficult to insert an SSD into. So difficult to both see and access that I asked the company if that was indeed what it was before proceeding.

ZimaCube Pro: Price

The ZimaCube Pro is $1,099 with the 16GB of DRAM that we tested, and $1,249 with 64GB of memory. That’s a pretty reasonable upgrade price (unlike a certain famous company that charges far more than upgraded components are worth). If you’re going to run virtual machines or Docker apps, go for the 64GB.

On the other hand, if you’re simply going for lots of storage via NAS, you might be able to get away with the $699 non-Pro version of the ZimaCube with a slower Intel N100 CPU, only 8GB of memory, and no Thunderbolt ethernet. It’s also 2.5Gbe only, so expect performance to top out at around 250MBps.

ZimaCube Pro: Ease of set up

IceWhale provides a utility that makes finding and accessing the ZimaCube a piece of cake, though it involves some guess work. Again, the lack of granular documentation meant no reference to a default username and password. I recommend installing the utility and have it open the web interface, then follow the prompts to create a new username and password with which to log on.

After you’re fully logged on via the web interface, you can define any RAID arrays or single volumes you want using the storage utility. It worked well in my hands-on but sometimes required a reboot before array deletions would register. Most users won’t make as many changes as I did during testing.

Beyond that, accessing the ZimaCube locally is just like mounting any other network resource, whether via 10Gbe or Thunderbolt ethernet bridge. Create shared folders via the web interface using the Files app, locate the ZimaCube in network locations, log on, and open said shared folders.

ZimaCube Pro: Network-attached storage interface

NAS boxes, at least those with display ports, can be used as the computer they actually are, if you attach a keyboard and monitor. However, as mentioned, they are typically configured and employed remotely via an HTML interface and accessed using a web browser. It’s much like using Teamviewer, RustDesk, etc. to control another computer remotely. The image of the Zima interface below is from my browser.

Modern NAS is capable of much more than their original purpose of simply serving up files. IceWhale implements a rather large array of browser-based apps that cover a wide spectrum of utility. They’re all available from an app store, though I missed a search function to browse them by function.

Media servers include Plex, Emby, Swingmusic, and Jellyfin. There’s the Handbrake video encoder and Calibre-Web for reading ebooks. Bittorrent/download clients include Transmission, qBittorrent, and Gospeed. Backup is represented by Duplicati, and Resilio Sync.

I’ve only mentioned the better-known applications; there are others. I was most enticed by the ZVM app which allows you to run virtual machines and comes with a demo of Windows 10 you can run.

Docker is nicely integrated into the system with an option in the app store to add containerized applications, though there’s not a lot of hand-holding in the process. As with much of the ZimaCube, a fairly high geek IQ or a zeal for learning Linux and Linux apps is helpful. Linux? Yup. Nearly every NAS box out there these days is running a version of Linux, which as you may or may not know, is nearly as app-rich these days as the pay competition and in some areas such as Docker, superior.

ZimaCube Pro: Performance

Given its 10Gbe and Thunderbolt 4 support, and the ability to combine drives in RAID the ZimaCube Pro is fast, though not as fast as you might think when you first hear “Thunderbolt.” That’s because, as mentioned, the ZimaCube Pro connects via a Thunderbolt connection using an ethernet bridge and network transport protocols (SMB in this case). The fastest we saw over Thunderbolt ethernet was about 2GBps reading.

For media, I tested the ZimaCube Pro with two fast (290MBps sequential transfers) 24TB hard drives in a striped RAID 0, four SATA SSDs striped in RAID 0, as well as four 2TB NVMe SSDs striped in RAID 0 using the adapter card. Both over the 10Gbe port, as well as the Thunderbolt port on a Mac Studio M1 Max. The results, while all relatively fast, were occasionally puzzling, and I ran into an “issue.”

The puzzler was the two HDDs logging well over 800MBps over both Thunderbolt and 10Gbe, significantly faster than the roughly 600MBps they’re natively capable of. Obviously there’s some caching going. Overall, it made it somewhat difficult to directly compare the ZimaCube’s results with other DAS or NAS boxes.

This “issue” was that at various times, under stress of the AmorphousDiskMark (64GiB) testing, the NVMe RAID 0 array would go belly up with one of the drives disappearing from the array.

ZimaCube Pro pointed to one NVMe SSD as damaged, but rebooting cleared the error and the array would again be available for use. I even changed the drive that disappeared and the error repeated itself. In normal copy operations, I didn’t see any errors. Only under the benchmark stress.

Tested individually, there was also no problem with any of the four SSDs. The issue is still under investigation by IceWhale at the time of this writing. Note also, that there’s no real reason to run all four NVMe SSDs in RAID 0 as there’s no way to utilize the speed over ethernet.

Below you’ll see the best results I got from each array on each bus. As AmorphousDiskMark overly stressed the ZimaCube’s NVMe, I switched to Atto for this article.

Atto shows faster speeds than Disk Speed Test and AmorphousDiskMark, but for the most part, I ran it using the far smaller 256MiB (Mebibyte) data set on a couple of tests. Note that when I tried the 32GiB (Gibibyte) data set (the second image below) on the NVMe RAID 0 array, it did not cause the same error as AmorphousDiskMark, However, both read and write speeds started bouncing all over the map. Again, caching.

All the Atto tests are over Thunderbolt 4 ethernet. First up are the SATA RAID 0 results which turned out much as expected.

Again, you can below that upping the data set to 32GiB delivered extremely mixed results.

With the NVMe RAID 0 array, results were wildly inconsistent even using the much smaller 256MiB data set. There’s no way writes should be this much faster (from 512Kib to 24MiB)than reads without caching involved.

The HDD RAID 0 array results were very consistent, but far faster than they have any right to be. As stated, even combined the total throughput shouldn’t exceed 600MBps. Again, though not confirmed by IceWhale this is likely caching.

Next is Disk Speed Test for the NVMe RAID 0 array over 10Gbe (left) and Thunderbolt 4 ethernet (right). Pretty darn close and these results make sense.

Next up are SATA SSDs which perform on par with the NVMe according to BlackMagicDesign’s Disk Speed Text. This is four of them in RAID 0. Note that ethernet is a major limiting factor in long transfers.

Below are the RAID 0 HDD results which again, make zero sense unless the ZimaCube Pro is using some sort of caching. Normally, a twin HDD array such as this is capable of 580MBps maximum.

I sound like a broken record, but it’s likely some sort of caching or software wizardry skewed the results. That said, it’s difficult to complain about anything that’s faster than you expect. So I won’t.

The basic story is this: You’ll get between 600MBps and 1000MBps using its 10Gbe port, depending on media, and anywhere from 800MBps to 1.9GBps (read) using the Thunderbolt 4 port as an ethernet bridge will be the norm.

Should you buy the ZimaCube Pro?

If you’re looking for fast, capacious NAS with the possibility of a faster direct Thunderbolt connection, then the ZimaCube is an attractive solution. Especially for virtual computing and media streaming. Overall, despite the issues (again, there’s really no need for NVMe RAID 0 over ethernet), I enjoyed both looking at the ZimaCube’s handsome countenance and using it. Note that IceWhale also makes one of our favorite modular build-it-yourself NAS solutions which you can find reviewed on sister publication TechHive.