Matches Unix workstations, but runs NT apps. A pair of SCSI RAID drives makes a fast processor pair faster still. Limited expandability in this minitower. The first thing you notice about HP's Kayak XU is its stylized gray and powder blue case, which is to the looks of the typical PC what a Mazda Miata is to a Chevy van. The motherboard and drive cage are wrapped in a 300-watt power supply and an HP Ultraflow cooling system with four fans blowing air directly over the CPUs, the drives, the system board, and the PCI slots.
Sensors automatically maintain the ideal operating temperature for each component.
That leaves two free PCI slots, one ISA slot, and three external drive bays. That's twice the bandwidth of the normal PCI bus, and it'll double again when Microsoft releases Windows NT 5.0. Living up to its name, the Cheetah is the fastest drive in the jungle, with a spindle speed almost twice that of most EIDE drives, a 7.5ms seek time, and an internal data transfer rate of up to 177Mbps. Even that's not good enough for HP, which combines Ultra Wide SCSI and RAID controllers on the system board with a 16MB presort cache to read or write to both Cheetah drives simultaneously. In addition to the usual ports, the Kayak has two USB ports.