Any system builder knows the drill for upgrading a hard drive: Take the customer’s system, make sure the primary hard drive is jumpered as a master, plug the new (probably larger) disk in as a slave drive, and reboot the machine with a bootable floppy in place. Clone the old drive to the new, switch the hard drives’ jumper positions, and the customer walks away with a system that not only features a larger, faster primary disk but also his old drive available for extra storage.

Now, we’ve discussed in these pages how notebooks are the fastest growing segment in the PC business. Resellers need to not only get into the sales aspects of whitebooks but also be able to service these sales down the road. You can’t upgrade notebook hard disks quite as easily as desktops. There are no secondary drive bays or even cable connectors for a second drive. One answer is to invest in some 2.5”-to-3.5” connector adapters, take both hard drives, and essentially graft them onto a desktop platform to do the cloning. This is probably the least expensive approach, but it ignores two problems: 1) The customer gets left at the end holding his old, bare 2.5” with nowhere to put it. 2) Some more experienced customers want to do their own upgrade work but have no idea what product to use in a mobile platform.
For either or both of these problems, Apricorn has the answer: its 60GB Xtreme Upgrade Kit. To jaded desktop salespeople, 60GB may not sound like much, but the typical 2.5” hard drive is only 30GB or 40GB, and the highest unit now being made is 60GB. The jump to 80GB is expected later in 2004, but no one is betting on higher capacities before 2005. Apricorn takes a 60G drive, wraps it in a high-speed USB 2.0 enclosure, and bundles it with its own cloning software on a bootable CD. (Not to knock Symantec’s Ghost, but Apricorn’s software is far more user friendly and intuitive for end-users to grasp.)

Customers or back room techs need only plug in the Apricorn drive, run the clone software, then power down upon completion. Then you pop open the enclosure, pop open the notebook’s hard drive panel, swap the two drives, and go about your business. In terms of hands-on labor time, the whole operation takes less than five minutes, and the end-user gets a new, fast external drive that’s barely larger than a Pocket PC to slip in his notebook carrying bag. Alternatively, on-site techs can at last offer a drive upgrade service, charging perhaps $50 for a five-minute job plus a respectable markup on the new disk.

Shuttle ST61G4
MSRP: $359.99
us.shuttle.com

Several months ago, I gave a little preview here of ATI’s RADEON 9100 IGP graphics-integrated chipset. By next month, I should be able to give you a review of one of the first ATX desktop boards based on this northbridge. However, the first successful run I’ve had with this product (I’ve had a couple different failed starts with pre-release boards) is actually in Shuttle’s ST61G4 XPC. This SFF box is also significant because it is the first instance of Shuttle’s new G4 case style.

While the original G case is now the anchor of Shuttle’s value line, the G2 case has emerged as a favorite among performance users, primarily gamers. (According to Shuttle, 60% of owners use their XPCs for gaming.) However, the fastest growing application for XPCs is now as a media center PC. Media center boxes don’t need expandability so much as they need cosmetic appeal for use in home living spaces and suitability to handling different multimedia hard storage technologies.
The ST61G4 addresses these needs and much more. According to XPC inventor Ken Huang, the ideal XPC would have a nearly or completely blank front panel. Clean, uninterrupted planes are the best aesthetic for a product such as this. While power and reset buttons, LEDs, comm ports, and drives have previously marred this ideal, you can slowly see the progression toward Huang’s concept in each successive XPC generation and most of all in the new G4. (The K style takes this march another step or two, but we’ll save that topic for another day.) The system fascia is dominated by a large mirror plate interrupted only by two flash media slots. With the flash reader installed, there is no external 3.5” drive bay, only the 5.25” external and a 3.5” internal. Power users are likely to cringe at this, but keep in mind that the target audience is users who only need one hard drive, an optical burner, a TV tuner, and a moderate-power graphics card. Note the diminished size of the front panel’s buttons and LEDs. Frankly, I’m surprised that Shuttle didn’t do away with the PC99 color coding of the audio jacks, because they really stick out now, but the K case will remedy this soon enough. Internally, the G4 is in other ways almost identical to the G and G2 designs that preceded it.

Then there’s the ATI IGP. If you imagine Intel’s 865G chipset and replace the Intel Extreme Graphics 2 core with an ATI RADEON 9000, that’s about what you get here. The architecture offers 8X AGP, dual-channel DDR400 memory support, DirectX 8.1, and 2.0 pixel shaders. So basically you get overall system performance that only trails Springdale by a percent or two, graphics performance that is up to six times faster than the 865G, and a lower price than Intel’s offering. As a graphics platform, ATI clearly has Intel beat.
Shuttle brings other advances to the ST61G4, as well. Perhaps chief among these is the long-awaited SilentX power supply. Cooler and more efficient than past models, the SilentX now offers a capacity bump to 250W and is markedly quieter than any XPC PSU that came before it. In fact, when I evaluated the unit, I had to get my ear right up next to the exhaust fan in order to hear it.
So whether you’re catering to devotees of the latest SFF designs or are looking for an exceptional chassis on which to found your media center offerings, give the ST61G4 a spin. You won’t be disappointed.