Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2
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Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2
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Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2
#2The moment I laid eyes on the grainy thumbnail with the hard drive in frame, I recognized it:
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...
A Quantum Fireball.
Full-size image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...
Something about the sticker placement and black lettering directly applied to the metal cover, I've never seen another hard drive with a similar aesthetic.
Those drives worked well, I still have a 40gb IDE PATA Quantum Fireball out in the garage and about 3 years ago I tested it and this baby still worked!
Funny how my brain latches onto the seemingly randomest things and patterns, but for stuff I want to actually remember, it can be a struggle..
Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2
#3Fond memories of web startups using these in aftermath of the dot com bust, such as Euroweb in Norway early 2000's.
Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2
#4This brings back a lot of memories. Back before home labs or home automation were a big thing, I had a Cobalt RaQ I used to raise up my monitor an extra inch. With a few scripts I got the LCD to display alerts from our monitoring system at work, and wired one of the buttons to telnet to the timeclock system and clock me in/out so I didn't have to do paper time cards when I fixed stuff after hours.
Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2
#5I still have a perfectly working Cobalt Raq 550 sitting in my closet... Pentium III 1 GHz, 1 GB of RAM. Don't know what to do with it. It's also extremely noisy so can't use it as a server or router at home.
Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2
#6This brings back a lot of memories. Back before home labs or home automation were a big thing, I had a Cobalt RaQ I used to raise up my monitor an extra inch. With a few scripts I got the LCD to display alerts from our monitoring system at work, and wired one of the buttons to telnet to the timeclock system and clock me in/out so I didn't have to do paper time cards when I fixed stuff after hours.
This bought back a lot of memories for me as well, I used to work for a hosting provider in the early 2000's and we had dozens of these things both in our data centre and internally for development purposes. I hadn't thought about them for years but the second I saw this article title I had flashbacks!
Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2
#7Okay. Now I feel old.
I ran some hosting using these and the raq3’s over here in Ireland.
Such a bang for your buck. Comparable gear from compaq with the right kind of management tools to do the same hosting ran in six figures. And the raq rolled over them for feature sets and stability and most especially security. Loved those 1u’s. They were awesome. Even ran a radio station’s streaming via Real that was installed on one of them. Cobalt able to compile their own RPMs for the win.
Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2
#8I still have a perfectly working Cobalt Raq 550 sitting in my closet... Pentium III 1 GHz, 1 GB of RAM. Don't know what to do with it. It's also extremely noisy so can't use it as a server or router at home.
See if it still runs if you just unplug most of the fans.
Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2
#9I still have a perfectly working Cobalt Raq 550 sitting in my closet... Pentium III 1 GHz, 1 GB of RAM. Don't know what to do with it. It's also extremely noisy so can't use it as a server or router at home.
See if it still runs if you just unplug most of the fans.
It will run with unplugged fans. But that'll shorten its lifetime...
Re: Refurb weekend: Cobalt RaQ 2
#10I've been interested in putting one of the MIPS variants of these into service in my homelab, but I can't find a reasonably priced one. It seems the x86 ones are most common on ebay