Zotac Mini PC

I recently bought a Zotac, dual nic, Mini PC for the purpose of building a pfSense firewall. However, the thought occurred to me this might also make a good ZoneMinder mini-server. Before I installed pfSense, I installed ZoneMinder on Fedora and generated the benchmark data below.

PROS:	CONS:
Two USB 3.0 Ports	No mSATA or M.2 slot
Small. It's roughly 5" square.	Total cost of ownership is higher than a small desktop computer with similar specs
Fully supported Intel x86 Architecture	place text here
Quad core N3150 CPU is power efficient yet powerful enough to support a handful of HD IP Cameras.
No moving parts = completely quiet

This short review focuses on the CI313-Nano, with dual gigabit nics with N3150 cpu.  There are several flavors of the Zotac Mini PC out there, and all of the varieties would make a great ZoneMinder server, so choose one within your budget.

List of Materials

• Zotac CI323-Nano - $150
• Two sticks, used 2GB DDR3L-1600 - $20
• Minimum 480GB SSD - $150

As you can see from the budget dollars I assigned to each piece of equipment, you are looking at over $300 total cost of ownership to build a ZoneMinder server with sufficient storage. That's a bit steep compared to some of the alternatives.

Install Fedora then ZoneMinder

The steps required to install Fedora and then ZoneMinder, using zmrepo, are identical to my review of ZoneMinder on the HP Slimline 450. Follow those instructions to get everything installed.

Performance

Here is a summary using sysbench:

• cpu - 48.7215s
• event storage drive - 8.2393Mb/sec
• database - 1092.79 per sec.

Compared to the results from the HP Slimline 450, the N3150 cpu in the Zotac Mini PC is just a tad slower than the J2900 in the Slimline. As expected the event storage and database results are quite a bit higher, because we are comparing an SSD to a traditional hard drive.

Cameras

This table describes the approximate resource consumption of a few different cameras on the Zotac Mini PC.

camera	format	resolution	fps	ring buffer (frames)	mmap (MB)	Max swap buffer (MB)	Zmc (%)	Zma (%)	Zms (%)
Airlink777W	mjpeg	VGA	5	35	42	24	6	6	10
USGLBH24A200	h264	720p	5	35	124	74	10	10	15
USGLBH24A200	h264	1080P	5	35	277	176	25	15	25

For a quad core machine, the system load should be kept under 3. This allows necessary wiggle room for ordinary operating system tasks. Taking that and the data from the table into account, the theoretical maximum number of 1080p cameras @5fps on this machine is 7.

Conclusion

The Zotac Mini PC strikes a good compromise in size between a typical small form factor desktop pc and a typical single board arm computer, such as the Raspberry Pi. While much smaller than an SFF desktop pc, the Zotac Mini PC is also quite a bit bigger than the Raspberry Pi. On the other hand, since it uses Intel based hardware rather than Arm, cpu and memory resources are relatively abundant.

Whether or not you chose to use the Zotac Mini Pc is going to come down to cost and how important size is to your application. If cost is more important than physical size, then a SFF desktop pc, such as the HP Slimline 450, would make a better choice. If, on the other hand, size is important to your application and the additional cost fits your budget, then the Zotac Mini PC would make a good choice.