ST62K Zen Internals I
Shuttle claims that the Zen is up to 20% smaller than other XPCs. Having no internal PSU helps, obviously. On first glance and appreciating the lack of a PSU, the Zen's still based on established Shuttle design, that is, a drive cage to the left and a heatpipe cooler to the right. A side-on shot, however, highlights marked differences.
For a start, the actual cage isn't removable; one has to work around it. Secondly, the hard drive is housed in its own sideways-mounted cage that slides in and out of the chassis. Shuttle's obviously listened to its customers' feedback. The above shot shows the optical drive cable pre-attached to the secondary IDE port and routed, along with a molex connector, through to the only place where a 5.25" drive can be located. It's just a question of screwing in the drive and attaching both cable and power plug.
The drive cage is secured by a thumbscrew and slides out through four runners. You can also see them in the topmost picture. We've seen this kind of mounting on non-XPCs before, but this is the first time that Shuttle has gone with it. It's a necessity simply because the main optical cage is part of the chassis.
Here's the other side with the drive cage taken out. As you can see, it's important to install system memory before the cage is remounted. What you can also deduce is the lack of floppy port or SATA connectivity. Therein lies an interesting problem. Shuttle's obviously designed the Zen to accept either a floppy drive or card reader, yet the former has absolutely no place here. It also raises the question of problematic installation and, importantly, the inability to directly use any of the burgeoning range of SATA drives.
The intelligent hard drive location minimises the length of cabling required. The internal clear CMOS jumper is awkwardly positioned behind the drive's short cable. That's no biggie, really, as the external one works just fine. Note the lack of an AGP slot.
The usual littering of chips around the S478 retention bracket. Shuttle uses VIA's 2-port FireWire controller and Realtek's RTL8100C Ethernet ASIC. Both are tried and trusted. It's also of no surprise to see the ALC650 sound CODEC lurking just out of shot. On the features front, our main gripe is with the lack of SATA support. We're adamant that Shuttle could have incorporated a discrete PCI-riding Silicon Image controller and a couple of ports.
