Digital Home Thoughts: Powerful, Small, Stealthy: Shuttle's SD11G5 XPC

Putting the Pieces Together: Assembling the SD11G5
Assembling the SD11G5 was a piece of cake, with one exception that I'll mention below. The manual has colour photographs and reasonably well-written English that makes it easy to follow. If you've never built a computer before, fear not: if you follow the instructions you can't go wrong.


Figure 17: A dab of thermal paste goes a long way.

Assembly follows this basic path: remove the CPU heat pipe (which, interestingly enough, is filled with distilled water), drop in the Pentium M CPU, put on some thermal paste, then put the CPU heat pipe back on. Installing the RAM is quick, and the hard drives go in quickly because the cables are already in place. The SD11G5 didn't have the ultra-cool snap-on rails that my SB95P had, but once you get the drives in they're not going anywhere.


Figure 18: The Raptor X hard drive installed. There's no point getting the version with the see-through top if you can't see it, but Western Digital had none of the standard enterprise versions available for review, so this cool feature is basically wasted.


Figure 19: The source of all my problems with the optical drive.

Here's where I have to get negative on Shuttle: how they've implemented the "stealth door" is hugely problematic. There's a plastic arm that moves towards the optical drive when you press on the outer button. There's a small plastic pad on this plastic arm – Shuttle includes two different sizes of pads – and the pad can be moved left and right on the arm to line up better with the button on the optical drive. The problem is that despite many hours of fighting and cursing, I wasn't able to get the outer button to open my optical drive. I tried both pads. I tried every single position for the pad along the plastic arm. I tried loosening the screws. I got so desperate to fix this problem I was jamming globs of Silly Putty into key positions trying to get things into alignment. Folks, when Silly Putty comes into the equation, things are bad. Want to see how bad? Check out this video and how much force I had to use to open the drive tray - and that was as good as I could get it after hours of tweaking, not my first try!

I had exactly the same problem on my Shuttle SN95G5, so this isn't an isolated incident – it's a problem with the G5 chassis in general. When I emailed Shuttle about this, their responses was that they were unable to test with every optical drive on the market. So what obscure drive was I using? I Pioneer 16x DVD burner. Yes, Pioneer. You know, the company that had one of the first DVD burners on the market and is still considered a market leader? It's not like I was using some strange off-brand drive – Pioneer is about as name-brand as it gets.

Throughout all my testing of the SD11G5, I ran it with the cover off and to open the drive tray I'd pull the entire drive forward in order to make contact with the button. In a strange bit of inspiration, I tried removing the two back screws on the drive, loosening the front two, then jamming the Pioneer drive forward with all my strength and tightening the two front screws. And guess what? It worked. But you and I know it shouldn't have to be that hard, and I dock Shuttle major points for not coming up with a better solution. I'm not engineer, but there has to be a better solution to this then what they're offering customers.