Realistically, you should only be using the IDE channel for optical drives, or memory card readers. The Shuttle XPC SN27P2 is intended to be equipped with SATA hard drives for storage purposes, and the nForce 570 Ultra incorporates several features which are not available to an IDE hard drive.

The two top hard drive bays only support SATA hard drives with SATA-style power connectors.

Right next to the nForce 570 Ultra chipset heatsink and fan are three Serial ATA II slots (the fourth SATA channel is at the rear I/O in the form of an eSATA jack) which can also run RAID modes 0, 1, 0+1 and 5. Shuttle supplies SATA cables which are just long enough for the case, and they are pre-positioned next to the drive bays along with power connectors.

To the right of the three Serial ATA II headers are the expansion slots, larger dual slot videocards (like the GeForce 7900GTX) can be installed, although that would take away the ability to install a PCI device. There is also space for you to install a third party dual slot cooler and Shuttle places a fan header close by in case you do just that.