I used a lot of NAS servers over the course of the last decade, and it's not often there's a new brand in this category. That's what IceWhale is doing with the introduction of the ZimaCube. The Chinese brand is best-known for its ZimaBoard single board server — think of it as an x86 alternative to the Raspberry Pi 4 — and having used it for the better part of the year, I like it quite a bit.
The ZimaCube is a much more ambitious effort that is designed to go up against the best NAS servers available today. So what's interesting about the ZimaCube, you ask? Well, is has six drive bays, decent internals that go up to a 10-core Core i5 on the Pro model, 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet as standard, M.2 bays, and even Thunderbolt 4 connectivity. You get 256GB of M.2 storage out of the box along with 8GB of RAM with the base model, and the hardware prowess combined with the elegant design makes it worthy of attention.
