No over current protection, bad power supply. "Try different hard drives" is not a valid response from tech support, that's simply buck-passing. That's a massive red flag - avoid this company like the plague.
Considering that all other NAS' manage to avoid torching Ironwolf drives, it's not a huge leap in logic to assume that NO drive, regardless of make, is safe in the ZimaCube. With SATA power specs having been standardized for decades, your Ironwolf drives were probably the canary in the coal mine. Given time, any electrical issue that cooked the Ironwolfs would have eventually destroyed other makes and models as well. Sorry for your loss, Will, but I'm glad they were old 4TBs. Had you fried 4 of your new 24TBs, that would have seriously been painful to hear. Thanks for the heads up!
The drives being destroyed is awful enough, but their response (or lack thereof) is catastrophic. "Try different drives." As if they're free and the data that you just lost will magically respawn itself. No apology, no offer to cover drive recovery services, no offer to replace the disks. Extremely untimely communication. I've had reservations about their QC in general for a long time, but this scenario never occurred to me. Their response as a company makes their products unworthy of holding anyone's data. I lot of brands use Asmedia controllers but so far Zima is the first and only one I've heard of killing HDDs, so I'm not going to blame Asmedia (yet). Just guessing … they're pushing the controller or the power distribution system or both to the edge of being in-spec to cram 6 SATA ports and all the rest of the connectivity in there, and the IronWolves do … something … just a bit more aggressively enough that the ZimaCube Pro falls off the head of the pin it's dancing on and takes the HDDs with it.
It sounds like over/under voltage issues to drives. If I was Zimacube Id be asking you to send the drives in for testing and replacing the drives as a good will gesture.
YES, we will provide free replacement of damaged ZimaCube units and compensation for HDD losses. Our R&D team is actively optimizing the product to improve performance and compatibility.
"Try different hard drives" LOL This is akin to having a vehicle that loses control and kills is occupants, only for the manufacturer to suggest "Try different occupants"
Who would have known a generic chinese company with no track record would make a bad product. There's a reason Synology and server motherboards are not cheap.
It's just that Synology is greedy when it can restrict software that the person in question bought on very old hardware. It's cheaper to buy just the case like a Jonsbo or Fractal and do the rest yourself at half the price.
@AABB-oi7hv Synology can't support old hardware forever, just like apple and Samsung don't. I agree diy is a good way to go if you have the skills, but I also only recommended a real server motherboard if you go that route. Just my opinion.
@@wojtek-33 Well, real server is Dell, Cisco or Supermicro. But in EU you don't want at home really use such of this "power efficient" things. Still i'm speaking about SOHO and prosumer solution. Synology move now from user more to business lane, but in real, any administrator joking about Synology. This company go down.
@AABB-oi7hv I didn't mean a full server, just a server motherboard, like supermicro, Asrock Rack, gigabyte, Asus. I know they're not as available in the EU like the US though. I bought my supermicro motherboards for ~$100 each and an Asrock Rack on ebay.
Wait, I don't think you said, what's the warranty situation here? Are they replacing the fried hard drives for the customers (and you) or refunding them? Or are they just shrugging their shoulders at? Because that can't be legal. I know that warranty disclaimers ("AS IS") including for "fitness for any purpose" exist, but I don't think that can be applied here for such a product and this use-case?
Very honest and nice job with he review. I will recommend not to buy the unit, but if you really want it wait until 1. The accept that there is an error. 2. They explain the problem. 3. They fix the problem. 4. The issue a recall.
Nas I built myself nearly a decade ago has been running in a cold/hot garage 24/7 and you know what, haven't lost a single drive. The older ones will start to fail soon enough due to old age... but come on...
Thank you so much for addressing this. This is a major problem for the industry since new drives can get fried on first power cycle the fingers could get pointed towards Seagate and they hae to bite the bullet for all RMAs. I feel sorry for your fried drives and hope Zima will replace those for you. I also suppose and hope no important data was lost since this was during a test scenario. Just imagine this happened to someone building their first nas and transferred lots of important data on it and found all drives were fried a couple of days later. Not ok at all from any manufacturer
Thanks for being open and honest about this critical flaw despite having the product for free as a sample. Was thinking of something similar to migrate away from Synology in my next upgrade, such a shame for a otherwise promising product.
Can you give some advice to Clean my synology Nas 1522+? its safe to turn off to do that? Can I take off the drives to help me when I use a vacuum cleaner?
I have *exactly* the same issue. My ZimaCube Pro has fried: 1x old WD Red 3TB pulled from a previous NAS. 1x Samsung none-NAS drive 4x reconditioned WD HCC550 enterprise drives 4x WD Red 8TB brand new However I have a random SATA SSD that works in the ZimaCube and works afterwards (I can't explain this) thankfully I managed to get refunds on the two batches of 4, but I currently have a large paperweight...
@@RangerDK21 I just checked - the SSD only uses 5V power, the dead drives all use both 5V and 12V. I'm no genius but logic would suggest that the 12V power is breaking drives. Thanks for making me check, now to have a fight with support...
Did some searching and reading the IceWhale Forum. There was only one other person that had this issue and they got a new backplane and it fixed their issue. Does not seem to be wide spread if only 2 people are reporting this. I'm sure that others would have posted issues if they ran into the same issue. They must have sold a lot of units. Still not good if people had their Drives fried.
Why don't you try and team up with another YT creator who does data recovery/electronics repair and let them find what components got fried on the harddrives. That will point towards what went wrong and why. Would be interesting to know if it was the same component on every drive that failed. Rossman and Northridge Fix are probably the two biggest but there are plenty out there.
it could be a hardware issue. but maybe it is a sata controller issue. maybe there is some grounding issue? sata driver issues? guess we will find out.
this is a really sucky situation, i don't imagine Zimacube will be able to compensate you for all the lost data off those drives... the drives themselves have a cost, but what price can one put on one's data. i really feel for you @Rex
if it's drive specific, then there's malicious code that tries to alter the drive's own FW - if this is the case, IceWhale has some explaining to do if it's power delivery issue then they need better PSUs and all existing units should be recalled and/or send user replacement part(s)
Good input. Good description. However I would try to use the "hot button word" FRY a little less.... It's not helpful and sounds like something a newbie would say. Thank you for the video.
Wow.. I really thought it was a clickbait title, as I remember you were advertising their boards, but you really burned your drives. Sorry to hear that.. PS: That's why we pay for Synology brand.
As a non tech person, is there means of testing the hard drive connection protocols against industry specifications? We also have to honest about a lot of products from this part of the world being close to junk. I think we have to trust a well known brand. Come back Synology all is forgiven!
Hope you get your hard drives replaced… haha good luck with that. At the very least, I hope IceWhale comes up with an answer, suitable RMA for affected devices that is easy for consumers that have purchased defective units and an apology.
Someone should measure the voltages by plugging a cable into the port where the hard drive would go and see if they are out of spec for 5v and 12v. I bet you something isn't being regulated properly and for whatever reason the Seagate drives you have can't deal with non-spec voltage for very long. As a computer engineer that is all I could see causing the issues you describe.
Have you got answer from them? It shell not be anything about wich nas drives you are using. They most use a realy cheep power suply on it. Thats realy bad. A great produkt with shitty power supply. They shell have given you new ones.
Had the same issue with an Asustor. Older 4TB Seagate NAS drives. Drives have been used without issue for more than 10 years. This is a design issue and defect. NAS manufacture needs to resolve issue and should replace drives. It is not worth the risk to use a product from a company that can't make their product meet a spec that is more than 20 years old. Send them all back.
What a piece of garbage! Ok, it can have all the bells and whistles but for what if it fries the drives? Now the question is: Will those masterminds refund all the people who bought their trash bin and ended up with the drives fried? Yeah, sure... And let's not talk about the comedy their (kind of...) support is...
DUH, you better not recommend it. Its garbage. If you know you have a high chance to lose your drive and data, on a Nas, then the Nas is trash. Even if it talks to you or is made of gold. The ZimaCube is garbage if it fails to do the 1 thing its suppose to do.
Simple solution: stay away from Chinese rubbish. There is a reason why it is cheap. Chinese HW with reliability on par with known brands has same price, so no reason to buy it.
Really? You think it's just the SATA connectors that are shady? What about the other things that haven't been found yet to hit a "price point"? FFS - you can get the Synology 1621+ for $899 and then add in a Mellanox 10Gbit nic for $50 and convert the Cache M.2 NVME ports to a proper storage pool. Why? Why review this product at all?
No over current protection, bad power supply. "Try different hard drives" is not a valid response from tech support, that's simply buck-passing. That's a massive red flag - avoid this company like the plague.
Considering that all other NAS' manage to avoid torching Ironwolf drives, it's not a huge leap in logic to assume that NO drive, regardless of make, is safe in the ZimaCube.
With SATA power specs having been standardized for decades, your Ironwolf drives were probably the canary in the coal mine. Given time, any electrical issue that cooked the Ironwolfs would have eventually destroyed other makes and models as well.
Sorry for your loss, Will, but I'm glad they were old 4TBs. Had you fried 4 of your new 24TBs, that would have seriously been painful to hear. Thanks for the heads up!
The feature set doesn't really matter if it destroys your data.
The drives being destroyed is awful enough, but their response (or lack thereof) is catastrophic.
"Try different drives." As if they're free and the data that you just lost will magically respawn itself.
No apology, no offer to cover drive recovery services, no offer to replace the disks. Extremely untimely communication.
I've had reservations about their QC in general for a long time, but this scenario never occurred to me. Their response as a company makes their products unworthy of holding anyone's data.
I lot of brands use Asmedia controllers but so far Zima is the first and only one I've heard of killing HDDs, so I'm not going to blame Asmedia (yet).
Just guessing … they're pushing the controller or the power distribution system or both to the edge of being in-spec to cram 6 SATA ports and all the rest of the connectivity in there, and the IronWolves do … something … just a bit more aggressively enough that the ZimaCube Pro falls off the head of the pin it's dancing on and takes the HDDs with it.
It sounds like over/under voltage issues to drives. If I was Zimacube Id be asking you to send the drives in for testing and replacing the drives as a good will gesture.
Will they financially compensate you for the drives that their product destroyed?
They should, but I doubt it.
YES, we will provide free replacement of damaged ZimaCube units and compensation for HDD losses. Our R&D team is actively optimizing the product to improve performance and compatibility.
The title should be "How A Company Shoot Itself In the Foot".....
...."How A Company Shot (Shoots?) Itself In the Foot"....
"Try different hard drives" LOL
This is akin to having a vehicle that loses control and kills is occupants, only for the manufacturer to suggest "Try different occupants"
"Try different hard drives..." Errr No - try different Company for your NAS solution.
It has so much power...it burns up your hard drives.
yeah, not touching that device. SATA power should never, ever fry a hard drive.
Who would have known a generic chinese company with no track record would make a bad product. There's a reason Synology and server motherboards are not cheap.
It's just that Synology is greedy when it can restrict software that the person in question bought on very old hardware. It's cheaper to buy just the case like a Jonsbo or Fractal and do the rest yourself at half the price.
@AABB-oi7hv Synology can't support old hardware forever, just like apple and Samsung don't. I agree diy is a good way to go if you have the skills, but I also only recommended a real server motherboard if you go that route. Just my opinion.
@@wojtek-33 Well, real server is Dell, Cisco or Supermicro. But in EU you don't want at home really use such of this "power efficient" things. Still i'm speaking about SOHO and prosumer solution. Synology move now from user more to business lane, but in real, any administrator joking about Synology. This company go down.
@AABB-oi7hv I didn't mean a full server, just a server motherboard, like supermicro, Asrock Rack, gigabyte, Asus. I know they're not as available in the EU like the US though. I bought my supermicro motherboards for ~$100 each and an Asrock Rack on ebay.
you forgot about QNAP
I'm so happy I sent this thing back and built my own NAS.
Wait, I don't think you said, what's the warranty situation here? Are they replacing the fried hard drives for the customers (and you) or refunding them? Or are they just shrugging their shoulders at? Because that can't be legal. I know that warranty disclaimers ("AS IS") including for "fitness for any purpose" exist, but I don't think that can be applied here for such a product and this use-case?
If this was rack mounted, it would be perfect. Minus the drive frying.
Fried your hard drives? This is like finding a random USB key on the road and plugging it in to your computer.
Very honest and nice job with he review. I will recommend not to buy the unit, but if you really want it wait until 1. The accept that there is an error. 2. They explain the problem. 3. They fix the problem. 4. The issue a recall.
Nas I built myself nearly a decade ago has been running in a cold/hot garage 24/7 and you know what, haven't lost a single drive. The older ones will start to fail soon enough due to old age... but come on...
Thank you so much for addressing this. This is a major problem for the industry since new drives can get fried on first power cycle the fingers could get pointed towards Seagate and they hae to bite the bullet for all RMAs. I feel sorry for your fried drives and hope Zima will replace those for you. I also suppose and hope no important data was lost since this was during a test scenario. Just imagine this happened to someone building their first nas and transferred lots of important data on it and found all drives were fried a couple of days later. Not ok at all from any manufacturer
> no compromise
No compromises? It's huge and pulls 220W.
Thanks for being open and honest about this critical flaw despite having the product for free as a sample.
Was thinking of something similar to migrate away from Synology in my next upgrade, such a shame for a otherwise promising product.
Can you give some advice to Clean my synology Nas 1522+? its safe to turn off to do that? Can I take off the drives to help me when I use a vacuum cleaner?
I have *exactly* the same issue.
My ZimaCube Pro has fried:
1x old WD Red 3TB pulled from a previous NAS.
1x Samsung none-NAS drive
4x reconditioned WD HCC550 enterprise drives
4x WD Red 8TB brand new
However I have a random SATA SSD that works in the ZimaCube and works afterwards (I can't explain this)
thankfully I managed to get refunds on the two batches of 4, but I currently have a large paperweight...
Sata SSD use much less power than hdd
@@RangerDK21 I just checked - the SSD only uses 5V power, the dead drives all use both 5V and 12V. I'm no genius but logic would suggest that the 12V power is breaking drives.
Thanks for making me check, now to have a fight with support...
Why would you keep putting drives in?
1:35 what? They are asking you to put in more hard drives into that thing? What??? I would not trust that thing after that experience.
Zimacube owes people hard drives.
I think there is a backplain issue there read the icewhale forum 😢
Did some searching and reading the IceWhale Forum. There was only one other person that had this issue and they got a new backplane and it fixed their issue. Does not seem to be wide spread if only 2 people are reporting this. I'm sure that others would have posted issues if they ran into the same issue. They must have sold a lot of units. Still not good if people had their Drives fried.
Why don't you try and team up with another YT creator who does data recovery/electronics repair and let them find what components got fried on the harddrives. That will point towards what went wrong and why. Would be interesting to know if it was the same component on every drive that failed. Rossman and Northridge Fix are probably the two biggest but there are plenty out there.
it could be a hardware issue. but maybe it is a sata controller issue. maybe there is some grounding issue? sata driver issues? guess we will find out.
this is a really sucky situation, i don't imagine Zimacube will be able to compensate you for all the lost data off those drives... the drives themselves have a cost, but what price can one put on one's data. i really feel for you @Rex
"It looks perfect"
Me: It looks horrible, like an '80s in-window air-con unit.🙁.
if it's drive specific, then there's malicious code that tries to alter the drive's own FW - if this is the case, IceWhale has some explaining to do
if it's power delivery issue then they need better PSUs and all existing units should be recalled and/or send user replacement part(s)
for me cheap power supply is the issue but what do I know ;-)
Terramaster : also china but at least a proper brand and have some experience on storage device ...
Not a "Pro" more like a Pyro?
Thank you for an update
Good input. Good description. However I would try to use the "hot button word" FRY a little less.... It's not helpful and sounds like something a newbie would say. Thank you for the video.
My first guess is a poor switching power supply.
Plus lacking / bad protection in the circuit
It looks like a backplane issue is what others are reporting.
Yes, that’s what I meant but kept the technical details out. No need.
It’s made in china and designed to fry any drive if the local ip address is US or Europe
Damn, testing is hard but you're not the tester either. Hope it gets fixed soon.
Wow.. I really thought it was a clickbait title, as I remember you were advertising their boards, but you really burned your drives. Sorry to hear that.. PS: That's why we pay for Synology brand.
It would look much better if it were half the height. Still, even if it looked perfect, I wouldn’t be buying it until they got the drive frying fixed.
As a non tech person, is there means of testing the hard drive connection protocols against industry specifications?
We also have to honest about a lot of products from this part of the world being close to junk. I think we have to trust a well known brand. Come back Synology all is forgiven!
WTF…”Free”. LOL. Nice “free” NAS. Sounds like the last time I got a “Free” dog...
Hope you get your hard drives replaced… haha good luck with that. At the very least, I hope IceWhale comes up with an answer, suitable RMA for affected devices that is easy for consumers that have purchased defective units and an apology.
Someone should measure the voltages by plugging a cable into the port where the hard drive would go and see if they are out of spec for 5v and 12v. I bet you something isn't being regulated properly and for whatever reason the Seagate drives you have can't deal with non-spec voltage for very long. As a computer engineer that is all I could see causing the issues you describe.
And it's a "Pro"
Have you got answer from them? It shell not be anything about wich nas drives you are using. They most use a realy cheep power suply on it. Thats realy bad. A great produkt with shitty power supply. They shell have given you new ones.
Had the same issue with an Asustor. Older 4TB Seagate NAS drives. Drives have been used without issue for more than 10 years. This is a design issue and defect. NAS manufacture needs to resolve issue and should replace drives. It is not worth the risk to use a product from a company that can't make their product meet a spec that is more than 20 years old. Send them all back.
What models of Asustor?
@@Ramhound Lockerstor 4 Gen2
black catch Day
There appears to be a market for the "jack of all trades - master of none" NAS solutions. I'll pass.
So, bad for hard drives. But great for chicken wings!
Copying other’s electronic products without any on staff knowledge of actual electronics design, is problematic.
Just a hypothesis - could it be the little red riding hood biting a chunk of the (iron) wolf to make a justice statement?
Dang!
What a piece of garbage!
Ok, it can have all the bells and whistles but for what if it fries the drives?
Now the question is:
Will those masterminds refund all the people who bought their trash bin and ended up with the drives fried?
Yeah, sure...
And let's not talk about the comedy their (kind of...) support is...
Yikes!
DUH, you better not recommend it. Its garbage. If you know you have a high chance to lose your drive and data, on a Nas, then the Nas is trash. Even if it talks to you or is made of gold. The ZimaCube is garbage if it fails to do the 1 thing its suppose to do.
Simple solution: stay away from Chinese rubbish. There is a reason why it is cheap. Chinese HW with reliability on par with known brands has same price, so no reason to buy it.
Thats really bad
Really? You think it's just the SATA connectors that are shady? What about the other things that haven't been found yet to hit a "price point"? FFS - you can get the Synology 1621+ for $899 and then add in a Mellanox 10Gbit nic for $50 and convert the Cache M.2 NVME ports to a proper storage pool. Why? Why review this product at all?
Well using Seagate drives is a bad start💀