ZimaCube 2 Pro Review An Unexpected 10GbE NAS with Thunderbolt and PCIe Slots

ZimaCube 2 Pro Internal Hardware Overview

When looking over the design and build of the ZimaCube 2 Pro, it is arguably how the system is organized internally that is the more interesting aspect. Whereas the system is rather unassuming from the outside, IceWhale has put in a good bit of effort to make all the drive bays and expandable compute hardware fit into the box and work within the constraints of the Intel platform powering the system.

First up, let us take a closer look at the front hard drive bays.

The 6-bay backplane is relatively straightforward, with a full-power and data SATA connector aligned to each tray. From this view, we can just make out the two fans that are providing ample ventilation for the drive bay.

Meanwhile, the vertically mounted drive trays offer mounting holes for both 3.5″ and 2.5″ drives. There are no toolless features here, so you will be screwing in each and every drive. This is one area that, in 2026, we really wish IceWhale would update. These should be tool-less for 3.5″ drives.

Moving over to the SSD drive bay, we have the single SSD drive tray with a lot going on including its own microcontroller.

Here, IceWhale is driving a 4x M.2 board via a U.2 looking connector and backplane. The SSD tray can accept up to four M.2 SSDs, with mounting holes for 2280, 2242, and even 2230 SSDs.

Disassembling the SSD tray reveals that IceWhale drives the M.2 slots via an ASMedia ASM2824 PCIe switch chip.

This is a 24-lane PCIe Gen3 switch, which provides a full PCIe Gen3 x4 connection to each M.2 slot. Meanwhile, the upstream port is configured as a PCIe Gen3 x4 connection as well, meaning that all four drives are intelligently sharing a PCIe Gen3 x4 connection. In practice, this means that the system can only ever get full bandwidth to a single SSD at once, but it is a needed trade-off to have a removable tray while also keeping in mind that the Alder Lake-P SoC only offers a total of 20 PCIe lanes. It is much faster than my initial expectation, which was that IceWhale was bifurcating the upstream x4 connection to x1 for each SSD.

Moving on, cracking open the back of the drive bay reveals the two fans that provide cooling for it. These fans have very accessible 4-pin power connections if you ever need to swap them.

Removing the tray containing the fans then exposes the back side of the drive bay, where we find one more ASMedia chip of note.

Tucked behind is an ASMedia ASM1166 controller. This is a SATA controller, which, coincidentally enough, is capable of driving up to 6 SATA devices. Since Alder Lake-P cannot drive 6 SATA drives natively, IceWhale needed to use an external controller, forgoing Intel’s native SATA connectivity entirely in favor of a PCIe Gen3 x2-powered SATA controller.

But enough of the drive bay. Let us dig into the compute bay that makes up the top half of the system.

Removing the lid of the Cube, we have ready access to a full Alder Lake-P-powered mini-PC. IceWhale has used a minimal amount of loose cabling here, so everything is relatively easy to get to, even without removing the heatsink-fan.

At the center of the system is the Intel Core i5-1235U chip. Since this is a mobile chip, it is soldered down and uncapped, with the compute die on the left and the PCH die on the right.

Up top, we have the system’s two SO-DIMM slots, which come pre-filled with 16GB of memory on the ZimaCube 2 Pro. As a first-generation DDR5 system mobile Alder Lake does not support high memory speeds, but the DDR5-4800 is more than sufficient. Unfortunately, current memory pricing is not doing IceWhale any favors, and the resulting 16GB of RAM in a “Pro” configuration is not especially spacious. For those with deeper pockets, the system can be expanded to 64GB of RAM.

On the right side of the processor is the system’s sole internal M.2 storage slot, intended for the OS SSD. IceWhale keeps things pretty light here with just a 256GB drive (our sample came with a Kingston drive), but it is a PCIe Gen4 x4 drive and matching M.2 slot, so the system does have access to a fast M.2 SSD if needed. For boot drives, 256GB is generous, but if you just want higher capacity storage, then this is a candidate to swap out.

And on the opposite side of the CPU, we have our final M.2 slot. But this one is not being used for storage. Instead, IceWhale has taken an interesting step by filling the M.2 slot with the AQC113 10GbE controller, which is then attached to a small breakout board via a ribbon cable. Using the M.2 slot in this fashion allows IceWhale to offer ZimaCube 2s with or without the 10GbE adapter, rather than having to make multiple motherboard designs with it soldered down (as is the case with the 2.5GbE i226 controllers).

Finally, at the bottom of the compute bay, we have the system’s two PCIe slots.

The top slot is a full-size PCIe x16 slot, electrically wired as a PCIe Gen4 x4 slot that hangs off the CPU. Below that is a PCIe x8 slot, which is wired up as a PCIe Gen3 x2 slot and hangs off the PCH.

This configuration allows the ZimaCube 2 to house either a pair of single-slot cards or a single double-slot card. Given that this is a relatively small and low-power device, the ZimaCube’s expandability is somewhat constrained. The compute bay offers only enough clearance for low-profile cards, and the small power supply is not enough to support an external PCIe power plug. All of which means that the compatibility expansion card options here are somewhat limited. Primarily to low-profile video cards such as the RTX PRO 2000, networking cards, and the like. Still, this is a great deal more than most other NASes offer, as PCIe slots are not a common feature. One big tip we have is that if you are venturing into a higher-power card, ensure it has active cooling, since there is no other fan blowing over this area. An NVIDIA T4 or L4 might seem attractive, but they will not have enough cooling.

Electronics aside, the compute bay is rounded out by the pre-installed HSF covering the Alder Lake-P chip. The heat-piped cooler is unremarkable for a desktop cooler, but is quite good for a NAS. It is more than capable of cooling the low-power mobile SoC. However, it should be noted that the fan on this HSF is the only source of airflow/active cooling for the compute bay, so nothing else provides active airflow.

This is not a problem for the SSD or the 10Gb NIC, both of which are laid out in-line with the HSF. It means that the PCIe slots are effectively without cooling, so any kind of mid-powered PCIe card will need to come with its own cooling.

And that is the hardware tour of the ZimaCube 2 Pro. Now, let us take a quick look at the included software.