Okay, let’s talk about setting up this ZimaBoard as a NAS. I’d been thinking about a home server thing for a while, something small to stash files, maybe run a few little apps. Stumbled upon this ZimaBoard, looked neat, low power, so I grabbed one.
Getting Started
First thing, unboxing it. It’s pretty small, smaller than I thought. Came with the board itself, power adapter, and a SATA cable. Felt solid enough. I had a couple of old hard drives lying around, figured I’d put them to use. One was a smaller SSD for the system maybe, and a bigger spinning drive for actual storage.
Plugged in the power, connected it to my network switch with an ethernet cable. Hooked up a keyboard and monitor just for the initial setup, though I planned to run it headless later. Powered it on. It booted up into CasaOS, which was pre-installed. That saved a step, I guess. Looked like a simple dashboard thing in the web browser.
Connecting the Drives
Next step was getting those drives hooked up. The ZimaBoard has two SATA ports right there on the board. I connected the SSD to the first port and the larger hard drive to the second using the included cable and another one I had spare. Needed to figure out power for the drives too. The board itself doesn’t power standard 3.5-inch drives directly, so I had an external SATA power adapter thingy I used for the big drive. The little SSD didn’t need much power, so that was simpler, think I used a SATA power splitter connected to the same adapter. It looked a bit messy with the cables, not gonna lie.
Setting Up the Software
Went back to the CasaOS interface on my computer’s web browser. It automatically detected the two drives I connected, which was nice. Didn’t have to mess with command line stuff right away.
I decided to keep CasaOS for now. It seemed built for this kind of simple NAS job. First, I formatted the large hard drive using the CasaOS storage manager tool. Just clicked the drive, hit format, chose a filesystem (stuck with ext4, seemed standard). That took a few minutes.
Then, I needed to actually share the storage. Went into the ‘Files’ app that comes with CasaOS. Created a new shared folder on the big drive, called it something simple like ‘SharedStuff’. CasaOS handles the network sharing part (SMB/CIFS) pretty automatically. Didn’t see many complex options, but for just dumping files, it looked okay.
I also poked around the ‘App Store’ built into CasaOS. Saw things like Plex, Jellyfin, Home Assistant. Didn’t install anything extra just yet, wanted to get the basic file sharing working reliably first. One step at a time, you know?
Using the NAS
Alright, time to see if it actually worked. Went onto my Windows PC. Opened File Explorer, went to the Network section. After a bit of waiting, the ZimaBoard showed up, named ‘casaos’ or something similar. Double-clicked it, and boom, there was the ‘SharedStuff’ folder I created. Success!
I tried copying some files over – documents, photos, a video file. Speed seemed okay over my gigabit network. Not blazingly fast like a fancy commercial NAS maybe, but definitely usable for home stuff. Copied files back and forth a few times, deleted stuff, made new folders inside ‘SharedStuff’. It all seemed to work as expected.
Disconnected the monitor and keyboard from the ZimaBoard. It just sits there now, a little box connected to the network and power, humming quietly. I can access my files from any computer on the network.
Final Thoughts
So yeah, that was the process. Took maybe an afternoon, including digging out old drives and finding the right cables. Wasn’t too complicated, mostly thanks to CasaOS being pre-installed and handling the basics. The hardware part, connecting drives, felt a bit DIY, especially the power for the 3.5-inch drive, but it works.
Overall, pretty happy with it. It’s a low-power, simple NAS doing exactly what I needed – basic file storage accessible on my home network. Didn’t break the bank either. Might look into adding one of those apps from the store later, maybe Plex for streaming videos. But for now, it’s doing its job just fine.