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Hi,
I have a zimaboard that is already up and running very well. I have it connected to two drives in the drive bay that Ice whale sells. What I want to know is how can I expand this to at least 4 more drives that I already own. Im using the pice port for a 2.5 gb connection to my network. Any help is appreciated. Love your YouTube channel!
Patric
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Great to hear the Zimaboard is working well for you. The key limitation is that it only has one PCIe slot, and you’ll get more out of the system if you reserve that for storage expansion instead of networking. A 2.5GbE connection can be handled just as effectively with a USB 3.0 to 2.5GbE adapter, which frees up the PCIe slot for an HBA or RAID card.
That way you can drop in something like an LSI 9211-8i or 9207-8i (flashed to IT mode) and immediately add 6–8 SATA drives internally. This gives you proper stability, RAID/ZFS compatibility, and much better throughput than USB-based storage.
If you’d prefer not to open things up, the simpler alternative is still a USB 3.0 to SATA multi-bay enclosure (Mediasonic ProBox, TerraMaster D4-300, etc.). Those work fine for backups or overflow, but the bandwidth is shared across the enclosure and isn’t ideal for performance-critical tasks.
So the best long-term approach is: USB for networking, PCIe for storage. That gives you both 2.5GbE speeds and room to attach the extra drives you already own.
