At 04:59 PM 1/27/02 -0700, you wrote:
>I have a buddy who got one of the Sabre boxes and brought it over to set
it up.  We never found a way to get into the BIOS.  Other than
>that, it IS a nice little box.  Great for typical office needs.
>
>That "SpaceShuttle" box is the same price as the Sabre without a CD drive.
 It's smaller, and they're almost identically configured
>except the Sabre allows two more PCI cards and has a PC-Card slot built-in.
>
>One other thing to worry about with these small chassis machines is the
heat generated by 7200 RPM HDDs.  I've got a couple of "Book
>PCs" that are similar in size to the Sabre but have no extra card slots.
The vendor advised against using 7200 RPM HDDs due to the heat
>they generate.  So I put in 20GB laptop HDDs.  They're way smaller,
quieter, use less power, and are very rugged. With a little work,
>you could probably fit two of them into a 3-1/2" drive bay.  They are a
tad slower, but for typical uses that won't be very noticeable.

The first web page I mentioned has a set of notes towards the end which
includes how to get into the BIOS (Short answer is you need to know the key
in advance, because it boots so fast you'll miss the prompt if you even
*think* about blinking. So you hold down the key, and then power up).

Hadn't thought about using laptop drives, but that seems like a pretty good
idea. Even if one couldn't fit two in the noise reduction alone could be
worth it. Or one could probably fit four or more if switching to those
matchbox size micro-drives (at the cost of much more $$).

I think the biggest reason I like the idea of using a Sabre is how narrow
they are. The SpaceShuttle box is fairly small, but still the width of your
average tower case. The shuttle at least, unlike another similarly sized
case I looked at, looks like it could have another one stacked on top.

On the thought of PC Card slots. Anyone know of a PC Card reader add on for
desktop PC's?  A reader sized to fit in a 3.5 inch bay could be nice if it
didn't cost too much. Seems like adding PC Card slots to desktop systems
would be a good idea. Since the various flash memory cards out there all
seem to had PC Card adaptors available it would also be more flexible than
adding just a SD or MMC or compact flash slot.  Also seems like a better
idea for replacing the floppy drive than say a zip drive to me (If IOmega
had early on licensed out the IP for the zip drives to other manufacturers
so there could be some competition to bring the prices down -- but these
days I have a hard time justifying to myself the idea of paying $10-15+ for
a measly 100 MB of storage.).