Review: Lima Ultra delivers much needed speed and performance improvements

Back in November, I wrote about the announcement of Lima’s latest personal cloud storage product, the Lima Ultra. I was excited to hear about the improvements implemented into the new Lima Ultra, after all, I had been a backer of the original Lima project on Kickstarter and while I did like my original Lima, it did have its short comings.

Before I go any further, what is the Lima Ultra? So, similar to traditional cloud storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive, Lima Ultra enables you to access your personal content from anywhere in the world, from any of your devices: computer, tablet or smartphone. But there is one key difference: instead of being stored on servers in the cloud (aka someone else’s servers), your personal content is stored safely at your home, on a USB hard drive that’s connected to your Lima device. And of course, this means your data is far more private.

When you open the box, you’ll find the Lima Ultra, some power adapters based on where you live, an ethernet cable, and power cable. Setting up the Lima Ultra is pretty straight forward, plug the Lima Ultra into your router via the ethernet cable, attach the power adapter to the power cable and then plug it into the outlet, lastly plug the USB cable from the hard drive into the Lima Ultra.

After you have everything connected, head over to install.meetlima.com and select the download based on your operating system. I selected macOS. Once the Lima app was installed, I opened it and ran through the app setup, this may require making a Lima account if you haven’t already. Then you’ll need run through the rest of the setup to configure the Lima and hard drive to work together. It does all of this for you, it’s very simple.

Once the setup is done, you can start putting files on the Lima Ultra like you would any traditional external drive, except, that they will also be available in “the cloud,” so you can install the Lima app on your iOS and/or Android devices and access the files on it from those devices as well (whether you’re at home or in another state/country). Pretty cool, huh?

The Lima Ultra sports a Quad-Core CPU clocked at 1.5GHz, making it 40x more powerful than Lima Original–something that is definitely clear with usage. Because of the updated specs, the new device is designed to benefit users with a lot of files and folders and/or to users who want to watch 4K movies streaming from their Lima device.

In my tests, streaming HD movies from the Lima was seamless with absolutely no lag or buffering. Opening files on the Lima was snappy as well. Additionally, browsing through folders full of files was fast, I remember with the original Lima, I would often have to wait for files to appear within folders–not the case at all with the Lima Ultra.

Additionally, compared to Lima Original, Lima Ultra offers faster file synchronization between user devices with, according to Lima, up to 16x improvement in transfer speed. I found in my usage, that I was able to transfer approximately 1GB per minute from my device to the Lima Ultra. That speed seemed to be consistently the case throughout all of my tests. With the original Lima, transfer speeds and file synchronization was slow and painful, having to wait several minutes to possibly hours at a time depending on file size and the amount of files you were transferring to the Lima device.

Overall, the Lima Ultra delivers the much needed speed and performance improvements to the original Lima. If you have an original Lima, I definitely recommend upgrading to the Lima Ultra. And if you’re looking for a more privacy-centric cloud storage solution for your files, the Lima Ultra is a solid choice.

The Lima Ultra is priced at $129 and is available for purchase from the Lima website.