Not excited for the zima project, but I did love the enthusiasm, and the Lego future he painted with his words.
No ECC, absolutely worthless for a NAS if you care about your data.
This is FUD. If you run a redundant filesystem like btrfs or ZFS that does checksumming (which you should anyway in a NAS), then ECC memory is only a nice-to-have and not vital.
I don’t quite get the point of these things. Yes, super tiny, but what’s the point, if every expansion requires a yanky case contraption?
Who exactly is this for?
It’s relatively cheap and not many boards like that come with a x86 chip (which makes tinkering a lot easier) and a PCIe expansion slot. How it looks doesn’t really matter if you have in somewhere hidden in a cupboard, like most home-server are.
But is it really that cheap for its performance? And lack of upgradeability?
I’d argue, most people would fare better with a regular thin client.