Mini Drives for Mini-CDs?

fist_187 asks: "i'm working on a semi-portable MP3 player project, and would like to include a CD-ROM drive in my setup, but a full size drive is a little bigger than I'd like. so, I thought about using a drive designed for mini-CDs...but I can't find any! I know that there are several MP3 portables that use mini-CDs, but does someone know where to find the drives themselves (preferably in a USB or IDE variety)? The only thing I've been able to find, after some searching, is the Imation RipGO!, but that's already a player... defeating the purpose of building from scratch in the first place. Does anyone have advice on where to look?"

Comments

another problem

[shdragon]

Isn't the combined size of the molex connector and the ide connector larger than the size of a mini-cd? I doubt you'll find a drive meeting your requirements. The only way I could see this working would be one that used the floppy ide/power connectoions. Of course, creating a cd-rom drive that can only hold less information than it's competition (zip drive) probably wouldn't do very well. But, gook look in your quest.

Re:I've been looking for these, too.

[cgenman]

There are two problems with drive-bay Compact Flash readers.

1. They are a real pain to convince to boot. I've heard it done, and there are distros that boot from Compact Flash, but I'll be damned if I can do it.

2. They are incredibly "fussy." Not only do the cards have to stay in at all times (without removing them), but sometimes you just can't boot with them in, or will get strange, somewhat random errors (under XP) which can be rectified by removing the card. Of course, removing the card will often crash the computer, but sometimes it won't (And no, unmounting under linux doesn't help). Quite often, if I'm having an unexplained propogation of errors on a running system, it is because I accidently left a CF in the drive.

With Compact Flash you also have the problem of 1,000 Read / Write cycles per cell, or 3 read / write cycles per day for one year. Obviously caching data is essential, but you still have that low, low media life to contend with.

I'd personally take a mini CDRW any day of the week. But neither of these solves the other problem, which would be a lack of IDE connections. If no IDE connectors are available, neither solution will do you any good. If there are available IDE connectors, why not open the side of the case and plug in a vanilla CD drive?