Don’t buy a Shuttle computer
This post was inspired by Ed Bott’s recent post about his troubles dealing with Shuttle technical support when he had a problem with a Shuttle system he purchased.
I bought a Shuttle SB86i barebones system a couple years ago, happily added my components to it, and began setting things up. I got the OS installed, some apps, and finally installed SpeedFan… which told me my hard drive was running at 67 degrees Celsius! See, the SB86i encloses the hard drives in a little metal cage with little cutouts for airflow, but there is virtually zero airflow over the drives. This takes an already hot drive and essentially encloses it in an oven that concentrates that heat and radiates it back into the drive. I mounted two little 30mm fans in the case to blow air over the drive, but that lowered the temp by only about five degrees, well above the drive manufacturer’s maximum temperature rating for that model. And the little fans’ whine was irritating as it was a frequency I could hear over all other ambient noise. I contemplated cutting ventilation holes in the case, but finally decided it was just a flawed design, and returned it to my vendor.
I then replaced it with another Shuttle box, an SB95P v2, which was much more intelligently designed in terms of thermal management, but the two 60mm exhaust fans at the top back of the case began making rattling noises after about two weeks of use. I e-mailed Shuttle — who I have since given a new name by replacing the first vowel with a different letter — to request replacement fans. They sent out another set of fans which also began rattling within three weeks of use. I got another set of fan, and those, too, failed. My last request to Shuttle never received a reply. That barebones system currently sits in another room back in its original box. I don’t know what to do with it. Other than the exhaust fans, I didn’t have any significant issues with it.
At work, one of our vendors supplies “custom” (read: “expensive”) computers for use with their software. These systems are — you guessed it — Shuttle boxes. Within the last four months, many of them have suffered a complete failure of the primary system fan which serves as both the CPU and system exhaust fan in this model. This causes the P4 CPUs to overheat and throttle down to the point of being unusable and internal system temperatures rise to the point that the computer either resets or shuts down. We have a service contract with them, but we have to ship them back to the vendor at our expense, wait up to a week to get them back, and all the while, a system is out of service which affects workflow in the affected department. (The lack of spare systems is a problem which we’re working on taking care of.)