Slashdot Mirror
Move Over Mini-ITX, Here Comes The gigaQube
Jim Ethanol writes "Since there's been a lot of interest lately in Mini ITX based servers I thought the Slashdot crowd might enjoy checking out Project gigaQube. The gigaQube is a modified Cobalt Qube 2 server appliance with 240 Gigabytes of storage running NetBSD's Mips R5000 based Cobalt port. Cobalt Qube's are quiet, cool looking little (7.25 x 7.25 x 7.75 inch) servers that when modified, make a powerful home server solution. They also seem to have achieved 'fetish' status in Japan. See some gigaQube action shots here, or check its vitals here."
The /. article mentions that this could be a replacement for Mini-ITX, but in reality, I suspect that you could use (with quite a bit of modding) a Mini-ITX in one of these boxes intead of the existing board.
A Mini-ITX would offer a nice replacement for the Mips-based CPU and dependence on old SIMM modules for memory.
Strapping a drive to the back of a CPU board with ty-wraps is not my idea of building a small server. But whatever floats your boat...
I built a Mini-ITX file server. It has three 120 GB hard drives; they are running Linux software RAID, so I have the same amount of storage as the gigaQube... but I can have any one hard drive die and I'm okay.
The gigaQube is smaller, but my Mini-ITX file server is small enough for me. It's also extremely quiet.
Details:
It's a VIA EPIA-M motherboard, with a 1 GHz "Nehemiah" core. It has two IDE controllers onboard, and I used an IDE controller PCI card to get another available controller for the third drive. The case is a common Mini-ITX case, almost a cube shape, which I got at the Fry's Electronics in my area. One drive is mounted in the (only) hard drive holder in the case; one drive is mounted in the 3.5" external bay; and one drive is mounted in an adapter bracket which is mounted in one of the two 5.25" bays. I actually have one 5.25" bay free, but I don't need it for anything. I use the 100 Mbit Ethernet jack on the motherboard for hooking the server up to my net, and I have Debian GNU/Linux (stable branch) installed. It's a sweet little server.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Obviously you don't use NetBSD. I have my primary mail/file/firewall/web/zope server at home running on a celeron 300a with 128M of ram, and it is zippy as can be.
I know this is the age of ever growing ram usage, but for a lot of things it isn't really needed. You can go a remarkably long way on 128M of ram. In fact, my machine never even swaps.
--wyn
I bet people would love it.
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
Give us a link, we'll see how zippy it is.
ymmv
Wow! Do you know Vin Diesel? You just need to find a third guy named "Alexander Isopropyl" or something and you'd have your own little gang!
Thanks for driving up the price of the Qube I was bidding on on Ebay. I guess I'll have to go put together a mini-ITX box just to spite the article. There should be an Ebay listing that comes with a slashdot article, kinda like the premium listings where you end up at the top of the page, but a lot more expensive...
People are the problem, stop procreation now!
So, you can get a 300 MB drive, put it on a 17cm (7.5" :-) board and get something about half the volume of the "cube" for almost certainly less cost. And it still runs Linux, and it has all those 386 RPM's that you can install.
If you really must have a cube form-factor, there are cuboid cases around the same size at www.mini-itx.com
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Keep an eye out for a bong in the action shots. Just what were these people smoking when they made this?!
The 866BASE gets a P3, 2 ethernet ports, and the usual interfaces on a 91mm x 96mm board.
Plenty of opportunities for packing a nice computer into a small case.