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Move Over Mini-ITX, Here Comes The gigaQube

Posted by timothy on from the product-before-its-time dept.

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."

8 of 209 comments (clear)

  1. More like Mini-ITX is a replacement for these... by jthorpe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Not enough RAM by wyndigo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  3. Apple should make a cube. by heldlikesound · · Score: 5, Funny

    I bet people would love it.

    --


    Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
  4. Re:Not enough RAM by spacecowboy420 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Give us a link, we'll see how zippy it is.

    --
    ymmv
  5. Jon Ethanol? by crapulent · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!

  6. Thanks A Lot by Pansy · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!
  7. Err no. by Space+cowboy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!
  8. Nano-ITX by Bushcat · · Score: 4, Informative
    If Qube hacking is simply a quest to get a small but useful computer into a pretty case, then Via announced its Eden-N processor last month, dissipating 7W at 1GHz and 4W at 533MHz. Samples shipping now, so I assume a Nano-ATX board will be available soon.

    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.