Not excited for the zima project, but I did love the enthusiasm, and the Lego future he painted with his words.
Self-hosting
Hosting your own services. Preferably at home and on low-power or shared hardware.
Also check out:
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.
checksums at the filesystem level does nothing to protect against memory corruption which can overwrite everything on your disk with null values and a matching checksum; fail to write anything to disk and/or do nothing.
But that is the gamble you take every day with every GB of RAM you have.
Btrfs automatically switches to read only mode when it detects unrecoverable errors, which prevents severe memory issues from doing serious damage.
But your scenario is so unlikely that it borders on the impossible anyways.
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.