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ZimaCube 2: 30-second review
The original ZimaCube was a Kickstarter campaign by IceWhale that delivered a workable NAS with a reasonable specification. Having proven the concept, the ZimaCube 2 Personal Cloud NAS is a direct-to-retail launch that addresses several shortcomings of the original.
At $799, it ships with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB NVMe SSD pre-installed, along with ZimaOS already loaded, which can be upgraded to ZimaOS+ for a small fee. Six SATA bays are ready for drives, and four M.2 slots sit in the expansion section for NVMe storage.
That puts it in direct competition with the UGREEN NASync DXP6800 Pro, which costs north of $1,000, though that machine does come with an i5-class CPU.
Where the ZimaCube 2 stands out is its pair of free PCIe slots, which make it straightforward to add 10GbE LAN, a discrete GPU, or additional M.2 capacity. It also accepts up to 32GB of DDR5 memory.
That flexibility extends to software as well. The internal 256GB NVMe drive runs ZimaOS, a Linux-derived NAS platform, but IceWhale also supports TrueNAS for those who prefer it.
On the whole, the ZimaCube 2 addresses many of the complaints levelled at the N100-powered original, while keeping the minimalist styling intact. But with memory and storage prices what they are, is it offering enough performance for buyers looking to run local AI workloads?
This might not be one of the best NAS devices for home and small business users, but the impressive functionality and build quality make it an interesting alternative.
ZimaCube 2: Price and availability
- How much does it cost? From $799
- When is it out? On pre-order
- Where can you get it? Direct from IceWhale
The ZimaCube 2 is only available direct from IceWhale for $799.
At that price, this Personal Cloud NAS sits above the mainstream six-bay offerings from Synology and QNAP but below their higher-end units with comparable processing power. The QNAP TS-664 in the same bracket uses a Celeron N5105. Neither offers Thunderbolt 4 nor any of the open-platform flexibility.
The Synology DS1825+ is an eight-bay machine that also ships without 10GbE as standard, uses the same AMD Ryzen V1500B with four cores, and comes with 8GB of DDR ECC. Synology asks $1,149.99 for the privilege.
The DS1621+ is now end-of-line and has not been replaced. The only six-bay DS series NAS Synology currently offers is the ageing DS620slim, built for 2.5-inch drives.
Closer in price is the five-bay DS1525+, at $799.99. That gets you the same AMD Ryzen V1500B, the same 8GB of DDR4 ECC, two M.2 slots, USB-C (not Thunderbolt), and a single proprietary PCIe expansion slot with Gen3 x2 lanes. Networking is dual 2.5GbE, though you can add higher speeds via the PCIe slot with a $109.99 E10G22-T1-Mini card.
It is worth noting that since Synology began restricting compatible drives to its own-brand range, you can no longer use third-party M.2 SSDs in these machines. Synology’s own SSDs arrive in remarkably small capacities and at eye-watering prices. The SNV5420-400G Enterprise Series M.2 NVMe SSD, a 400GB drive with a 650MB/s write speed, costs $484.99. If Synology is still positioning itself as a prosumer and small-business NAS vendor, its pricing makes that argument difficult to sustain.
Asustor has the Lockerstor 6 Gen3 AS6806T, a six-bay machine with a Quad-Core AMD Ryzen Embedded V3C14, 2.5GbE LAN ports, the option to add 10GbE via PCIe, and four M.2 slots. It lacks Thunderbolt but does support USB4. Asustor wants $1,539.99 for that, which puts it on par with the ZimaCube 2 Pro.
A more balanced comparison is with Ugreen, which launched its iDX series at CES 2026 with Intel Core Ultra 7 processors, dual 10GbE, and Thunderbolt 4 at competitive prices. Those units are entering the market at the same time as the ZimaCube 2, and their specifications closely overlap with those of the ZimaCube 2 Pro.
From Ugreen, and currently on offer, $679.99 gets you the four-bay NASync DXP4800 Pro, which uses the i3-1315U, comes with 8GB of DDR5 RAM, 10GbE and 2.5GbE LAN, and dual M.2 slots running at Gen 4×4. It lacks Thunderbolt and has two fewer bays, but the processor is 13th Gen rather than 12th.
Six bays from Ugreen means stepping up to the NASync DXP5800 Pro, which uses the i5-1235U found in the ZimaCube 2 Pro. It comes with dual 10GbE LAN, 8GB of RAM, dual PCIe Gen4x4 M.2 slots, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a single PCIe x4 slot. The asking price is $1,027.99. The ZimaCube 2 Pro costs $1,299 and comes with 16GB of memory.
Circling back to the ZimaCube 2, the pricing is reasonable for what you get, particularly when compared to Asustor or Synology.
ZimaCube 2: Specs
|
Model: |
ZimaCube 2 Personal Cloud NAS |
|---|---|
|
CPU: |
Intel i3-1215U, 6 Cores, 8 Threads |
|
GPU: |
Intel UHD Graphics (64 EUs), Intel Alder Lake-UP3 GT1 |
|
NPU: |
N/A |
|
RAM: |
1x 8GB LPDDR5 (upgradeable to 32GB) |
|
Internal Storage: |
256GB SSD for ZimaOS |
|
SATA Storage: |
6 bays (3.5 or 2.5 inch) |
|
M.2 Storage: |
4 slots M.2 2280/2242/2230 NVMe PCIe 4.0 |
|
Ports: |
2x Thunderbolt (USB-C) 40Gbps, 4x USB 3.0 USB-A, 1x USB 3.0 USB-C, 1x HDMI 2.0b, 1x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x 3.5mm audio jack, 1x PCIe 4.0 slot (x16 physical, x4 lanes), 1x PCIe 3.0 (x4 physical, x2 lanes) |
|
Networking: |
2x RJ45 2.5GbE LAN |
|
OS: |
ZimaOS 1.61 |
|
Max Capacity: |
6x 32TB SATA (192TB) + 4x 8TB M.2 (32TB) |
|
RAID Modes: |
JBOD / Basic / RAID 0 / RAID 1 / RAID 5 / RAID 6 / RAID 10 |
|
PSU: |
External 19V 11.58A 220W |
|
Dimensions: |
240 x 221 x 220mm (LxWxH) |
|
Weight: |
7.4kg (including the PSU) |
ZimaCube 2: Design
- All-metal construction
- Bays are not lockable
- Easy internal access
From the outside, the ZimaCube 2 looks remarkably similar to the original. It is the same size, the same aluminium box, with storage below and the system above, which makes sense from a heat management perspective.
The six front-loading SATA bays sit behind a plastic grille held in place by magnets, but there is no obvious way to remove it. The designer left no tab to pull it or get a fingernail underneath. Having removed it a couple of times, I would be more likely to leave the grille in the box than deal with it repeatedly.
With the grille off, there are six vertically mounted drive trays and a seventh for the four M.2 drives. The trays were a disappointment on several counts.
They are not lockable and require screws, regardless of whether you are fitting 2.5- or 3.5-inch drives. Virtually every branded NAS maker now offers tool-less 3.5-inch trays, and installing 24 screws for a full build is a tedious way to spend an afternoon.
Extracting the M.2 bay means unscrewing a retained thumbscrew, but that alone is not enough to pull it free. Getting it out required me to remove bay six first, just to find something to grip. These are the sort of issues that should have been caught at the prototype stage.
Another carry-over from the original is the placement of the ports 14cm up the cube. Three USB 3.0 ports sit on the front (two USB-A, one USB-C), alongside an audio jack and the power button. Around the back are the power inlet and reset hole, dual 2.5GbE LAN ports, dual Thunderbolt 4, dual USB 3.0 Type-A, DisplayPort 1.4, and HDMI 2.0 video outputs.
The problem with routing USB and Thunderbolt cables from mid-height is that most external drives ship with cables that are not long enough to reach a desk without some awkward draping. Placing the ports on top would not be much better. This is why most NAS designs put the mainboard, and its associated ports, at the base.
The upside of IceWhale’s approach is that the system is genuinely easy to access. Remove four screws, lift the top, and everything is exposed: the DDR5 SODIMMs, the two PCIe slots, the CPU cooler, and an unoccupied M.2 slot on the motherboard.
What I found slightly odd is that there are no fans pushing or pulling air through this area, only small perforations in the sides and rear. Warm air will naturally rise and collect where the system lives, but there is no active mechanism to extract it. The CPU cooler in this model is noticeably larger than the one in the original ZimaCube, which helps, but once the heat leaves the chip, it still has nowhere obvious to go.
Keeping the same enclosure no doubt reduced the cost of bringing the ZimaCube 2 to market. But the fact that almost none of the physical design problems have been addressed is hard to overlook.
ZimaCube 2: Features
- Intel i3-1215U
- 20 PCIe lanes
- Not an AI platform
More than anything else, the N100 processor is what damaged the original ZimaCube. Intel gave that chip just nine PCIe lanes, which was simply not enough to service six hard drives, USB ports, and dual 2.5GbE LAN simultaneously.
The ZimaCube 2 swaps that for the Intel i3-1215U, a CPU with six cores, eight threads, and, critically, 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes. Since those lanes are PCIe 4.0 rather than PCIe 3.0, the total available bandwidth is more than four times what the N100 could offer.
The architecture splits those six cores into two performance cores with hyperthreading and four efficiency cores, giving eight simultaneous threads in total. That is not as capable as the ZimaCube 2 Pro, which uses the i5-1235U with ten cores, but it is more than sufficient for the typical NAS workload mix.
In practice, the ZimaCube 2 can handle Docker containers, media transcoding, RAID rebuilds, and light virtualisation running concurrently, without the processor becoming the obvious throttle.
That said, the 20 lanes have to stretch across a lot of hardware. The bandwidth consumers include two M.2 slots on the mainboard, four M.2 slots on the bay-seven riser, two PCIe slots, six SATA drives, all the USB ports, dual 2.5GbE LAN, and the two 40Gbps Thunderbolt 4 connections. That is why there is no 10GbE LAN port included on the standard model.
The four M.2 slots in the expansion bay also deserve some clarity. Each runs at PCIe Gen 3 x1, which gives an individual bandwidth ceiling of around 800MB/s per slot. That is adequate for tiering or caching, but it is not the full-speed NVMe performance the slot count might suggest. Users expecting PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds will be disappointed. Those planning to use them as high-capacity supplementary storage on top of a SATA array will find them perfectly serviceable.
The obvious answer to both the missing 10GbE port and the slow M.2 slots is the PCIe expansion slot, but what those slots appear to offer and what they actually deliver is worth clarifying.
The larger x16 slot looks as though it could take a low-profile video card, but electrically it is only PCIe 4.0 x4. Each lane delivers 2GB/s, so there is enough bandwidth for a single PCIe Gen4x4 NVMe drive or two 10GbE LAN ports.
The second PCIe slot is physically x4 but electrically only two lanes of PCIe 3.0. IceWhale sells an accessory card for this slot, with two M.2 2280/2242/2230 positions, though it was designed for PCIe 4.0 and would perform better in the x16 slot. With two PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives on that card, each would get around 4GB/s.
There is also a PCIe to 2.5GbE Ethernet adapter available, offering a relatively inexpensive way to add network bandwidth if your infrastructure supports channel bonding. Alternatively, Thunderbolt adapters can deliver 5GbE or even 10GbE if you need it.
It is hard to overstate how much of an improvement the i3 represents over the N100. The bandwidth increase alone unlocks possibilities that simply were not available before. Even so, this is 12th Gen Intel silicon built on Intel’s 10nm Enhanced SuperFin process, a considerable distance behind the Series 100, 200, and 300 silicon Intel currently ships.
There are no AI accelerator components here whatsoever. Ugreen’s iDX series has moved to the Intel Core Ultra 7 255H, rated at 96 TOPS. Neither the ZimaCube 2 nor the Pro model can compete with that, so if running a local LLM on your NAS is the goal, this is not the right machine.
One last point worth flagging is the memory configuration. The machine ships with a single 8GB DDR5 module. There is a free slot, so getting to 16GB is straightforward, but a single module means the NAS is not running in dual-channel mode. DDR5 4800MT/s is inherently dual-channel in specification, but most systems only enable it with two modules fitted. Adding a matching module would noticeably improve memory bandwidth.
IceWhale states the system accepts two 32GB modules for a maximum of 64GB, which is four times the total in the N100. At current RAM prices, most buyers are unlikely to go that far, but there is headroom if needed.
The ZimaCube 2 platform is a significant step forward from the original. The problem is that the NAS market has moved forward, and some of the competition is now ahead of where this machine has landed.
ZimaCube 2: Software
- ZimaOS Plus
- Paid licensing tier
- TrueNAS approved
ZimaOS arrives pre-installed and boots straight to a browser-based dashboard, with no keyboard or monitor required during setup, provided the machine finds a network connection.
The interface has matured considerably since the early CasaOS days. Drive management, RAID configuration, Docker container deployment, and an app store covering Plex, Jellyfin, Immich, Photoprism, Home Assistant, and several hundred more are all accessible from the same web UI, with no command line needed.
Compared to the relatively limited app selection that Ugreen currently offers, ZimaOS looks well-stocked. Plex, Home Assistant, Jellyfin, Nextcloud, Syncthing, Pi-hole, Portainer, Tailscale, and WordPress are all there.
It is worth noting, though, that most of these apps are not native ZimaOS applications. When you launch them, they open as web-based applications with their own port numbers rather than appearing within the main system interface. That suggests the App Manager is essentially managing pre-configured Docker installations behind the scenes.
There is a reasonable argument that with tools like Portainer now widely available, the concept of native applications matters less than it once did. That was previously one of the strongest selling points for Synology. What ZimaOS does is make Docker installs feel as seamless as native apps while still delivering the functionality users actually want.
What users do not want is an unexpected bill.
The introduction of a paid ZimaOS Plus tier, priced at $29 for life, has generated debate in the community. IceWhale frames it as a contribution to sustainable development rather than a subscription, and states that a third of licence revenue is distributed back to community contributors.
Core functionality for most home users is available without the Plus licence. The paid tier unlocks unlimited disk support, unlimited users, and certain advanced features. Whether that feels fair depends on how much of the Plus tier a given user actually needs. Given the overall cost of the machine, asking for a licence on top feels like a second bite of the cherry.
If you don’t pay the extra $29, you get a version of ZimaOS that can support a maximum of four disks and three users. And, although basic RAID is available in the free version, Plus enables advanced configurations for better redundancy and data protection, including enhanced support for ZFS and larger storage arrays. There are also enhancements in remote access, backup/sync and priority support.
It’s worth noting that the license is ‘lifetime’, but it applies only to that specific hardware, not to any other ZimaOS devices.
That said, the cost and the debate can both be sidestepped entirely. The platform was designed with OS flexibility in mind, and TrueNAS, Unraid, Proxmox, and OpenMediaVault all run without modification. pfSense and OPNsense are options for anyone wanting to repurpose the hardware as a network appliance.
ZimaCube 2: Performance
- Network options
- Expansion possibilities
- Limited M.2 performance
The case for buying the ZimaCube 2 Standard over its predecessor rests almost entirely on the Core i3-1215U. The original ZimaCube’s N100 was a four-core, low-power processor with nine PCIe 3.0 lanes, which proved wholly inadequate for a six-bay NAS running dual 2.5GbE networking alongside M.2 storage and any active workload.
The i3-1215U changes things fundamentally. Six cores and eight threads with 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes means the bus contention that plagued the N100 is no longer a concern. Docker containers and media transcoding can now run at the same time without the processor struggling, and the system can handle light virtualisation on top of that.
Networking on the standard model tops out at dual 2.5GbE, which in practical terms means a ceiling of around 280MB/s per port. For home backup, media streaming to multiple devices, and general file serving, that is adequate. For workloads demanding higher throughput, the Thunderbolt 4 ports offer a direct-attach path at up to 40Gbps, which is a meaningful alternative to 10GbE for single-machine workflows.
Anyone wanting permanent 10GbE over the network will need the Pro model, or will need to use the PCIe 4.0 slot for a 10GbE card. These are not expensive, and you are not limited to IceWhale-approved options.
From a performance standpoint, the weak link in the ZimaCube 2 is the M.2 expansion section. Gen 3 x1 per slot does not offer a dramatic improvement over SATA SSD speeds. If you plan to use the slots for hard drive caching, one slot for reads and one for writes, the speeds are acceptable. For anything more demanding, the PCIe 4.0 slot is again the route to better performance.
And that is the underlying tension. The PCIe 4.0 slot is the answer to the 10GbE question, the faster M.2 question, and the GPU question. But there is only one of them. Giving this machine four times the bandwidth of its predecessor turned out not to be quite enough.
ZimaCube 2: Final verdict
The ZimaCube 2 is a much better machine than the original, but several problems have been carried straight over from the first generation without being fixed.
IceWhale seems committed to the cube form factor, even though NAS buyers generally do not care what shape their hardware is. What is telling is that the team listened carefully to criticism of the N100 processor and acted on it, yet largely ignored feedback about the missing drive tray locks and the awkward port placement.
Perhaps the third generation can fix what this one has not, while still keeping the distinctive shape.
In other respects, the ZimaCube 2 is the machine the original should have been. Swapping the N100 for the Core i3-1215U removes the architectural ceiling that undermined the first generation, and Thunderbolt 4 gives the standard model a high-speed access path that partially offsets the 2.5GbE networking limitation.
The M.2 expansion section is slower than its slot count implies, and 8GB of RAM is tight for a machine capable of running Docker containers alongside a six-bay RAID array. But both are straightforward to fix, and the open platform means the hardware is not held back by the software running on it.
At $799, this is a genuinely compelling option for anyone who wants a capable, expandable, properly hackable six-bay server without paying Pro prices.
Should you buy a ZimaCube 2?
|
Value |
Lots of features, a solidly built |
4 / 5 |
|
Design |
Repeat of the first ZimaCube |
3.5 / 5 |
|
Features |
Six bays, six M.2 slots and PCIe expansion |
4 / 5 |
|
Software |
Workable OS once you have paid extra for + option |
4 / 5 |
|
Performance |
Limited by the 2.5GbE LAN ports and Gen3x1 M.2 slots |
3.5 / 5 |
|
Overall |
Plenty of possibilities in one NAS |
4 / 5 |
Buy it if…
Don’t buy it if…
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mark@pickavance.com (Mark Pickavance)
