> But it is really a terrible design, you only have 5 5.1/4 external drive bays to put drives into, no internal(!?), and you must use some hard-to-get drive rails to mount any drives there as well.
I dunno what tower you had, but I had no such problems whatsoever. The only issue I had was fitting the Cyberstorm MKI Ram-Module without the 3,5" drive bay colliding. Took me some sawing, but it fit at last.
I am also curious about the drive rails you were speaking about... :-?
> The onboard SCSI is not DMA and on my 4000T it refuses to work with HDD's...
Sorry, now this is really nonsense. The onboard-SCSI NCR controller is onle of the best you can get (for Wide-SCSI2) and of course does DMA with hardly any CPU load. It yielding about 9,8MB/sec here, which is about the maximum you can achieve. Only the Ultrawide SCSI controllers are faster (CS MK3). I never came across a harddisk that didn't work with the controller. I also have a CD ROM, a CD burner and a ZIP drive, connected to it, it works like a charm.
About the module-design: You may like it or not, but serves its purpose. Moreover, the sound quality from the audio/video module is a lot better than that of the A4000D.
Also, the A4000D suffers from really bad motherboard bus performance. The A4000T also comes with a Lithium battery instead of NhCd, so it won't destroy the mainboard with the battery leaking.
I had both, and I never ever would exchange my A4000T by the A4000D I had before. Getting to the CPU card is a pain on the A4000D. All so tight, no room for cables or air circulation. As about the "better designed piece of hardware", ask Dave Haynie it. The A4000D was a cost-reduced prototype going into production when it never should have...
But yes, A4000Ts are very rare...
